Polycount: How Relevant is it? PAs?
chikako_8af55a8a68
Posts: 83
A topic of discussion I am interested in, maybe also of interest in any who vend. How important is polycount, and by extension, loading times that can be associated with high polycounts?
Let me preface this with a little background. Now and then I get customers who...
- Want to load up lots and lots of models at once (In our case, models that have 100% complete interiors as well as exteriors)
- Get annoyed and angry that load times are long when importing high poly models into already heavily populated scenes
Most of the brokerages I know in the Poser/DS vending community do not list polycount. Id guess that people are find with eyeballing products and then making an educated guess if its appropriate or not for their use.
What do you all think? Should the Poser/DS community post polycounts?
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Comments
I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing it. Does it stop me from buying things? No, not generally, but I have an above average machine and I'm quite used to the pitfalls of working in large scenes with DAZ Studio. :)
I wouldn't mind putting it in my future product read-me's. Though, you may want to be seated before reading it ;)
For myself, as long as the vendor warns that a given item has an exceptionally high polycount, I don't need to know the specifics. But it's not something I'd mind seeing either.
High polycount is of interest, mainly as I would like to keep polycount down where possible. That doesn't mean that I won't buy high poly items but I would avoid an item that seemed excessively high for what it is.
The polycount should suit the purpose of the model.
My favourite modellers are people like Stonemason who keeps the polycount down where they can through using good maps for displacement, bump etc....
Polycount, for me, is a fact of life. Most of my work ends up with several million polys by the time I'm done. I once had a DS4 scene that took a week to save (yes, a WEEK -- well, 10 minutes shy of being a complete week) those in the freepository got running updates while it was happening. My DS save files can be well over 250Meg in size, and my Maya scenes are massive!
That being said, I will always go for a higher poly model if the polys are justified. I wouldn't be happy if a square post was 100 polys just for the sake of having more polygons. However, I'd rather have polygonal leaves than transmaps for example.
Kendall
I agree up to a point. Remember that lots of textures can slow down your scenes just as fast as lots of polys, so indiscriminate use of disp and bump is often counter-productive. But when used correctly, maps are good. (I'm not saying Stefan does this - just in general).
I've recently done several full-on house models, and I'm finishing a Bungalow right now. I've tried every way possible to figure out how these models could be loaded in two parts - interior and exterior - with the exterior only being used for scenes where no interior is needed - but it's nigh impossible. As soon as you remove the interior, the house looks incomplete. Parts like windows have to be modelled fully, or it shows up even for exterior-only use. About all you can get away with is removing things like baseboard and molding, sockets and switches, etc.
My average for an entire interior/exterior house with all parts posable, seems to be around 40-50k polys. I'm beginning to tend to the view that if it's less than the average human figure, it's usable.
mac
A polycount would be nice. That way we will know exactly what our scenes can handle, and our rigs for that matter.
Kind of a good rule of thumb when looking at models. If they detail is modeled into the prop it is going to be higher poly. We cut as much poly as we can out of model but depending on the detail it could get to be around 60k poly on a model. I try to make all my models below 50k but sometimes it is really hard to do depending on which modeling app you are using. If you are using 3DSMax is can get highly detailed models with low poly because of how the app handles poly. I'm using Silo, so it don't handle poly the same way so my models tend to be on the heavier side compared.
That's a really good point Frank, modelling programs do handle polys differently and that can impact on the work flow.
Just wanted to mention that one of the reasons I used artists who do a lot of landscape as an example is that is one area that uses a lot of polys and can quickly slow a machine down even on their own without anything else in the scene.
This is kind of a bit beyond my current understanding of the software, but doesn't effective use of displacement maps require at least a certain amount of polygons?
I'm recently running into this a lot with Reality, where I'm trying to apply a displacement map to, let's say, a brick wall and end up having to subdivide it a million times for the map to have any effect at all. Sure it's still easier on the scene, but rendering still takes a lot of time. Not to mention the time it takes me to find out how many subdivisions are needed :D
That depends on the application - some, yes, use displacement only to move existing vertices but others, including the Poser and DAZ Studio native render engines, can subdivide the real polygons to generate enough for any desired level of displacement (this is one of the things that Shading Rate affects).