I''m developing my first game. Before I acquire a modeling team, I would like to know more about polygons. I want the game''s visuals to be of no less than "Halo" quality. How many polygons should we use for a five foot tall character, an eight foot tall character, or an immense arachnid? A tree? A boulder? At what level of smoothness will the gameplay be negatively affected? Is a desert with 3D sand out of the question?

oh yeah, planning on making halo visuals?
get a few years of 3D coding experience so you know what you are talking about, THEN start planning making games like this.

PLEASE POST ONLY USEFUL RESPONSES. I am not making this game alone. Don''t worry about the rest of my project and please don''t waste my time.

Well first, what technology do you have to use on those polygons? Can you bump-map? Pixel shaders?
Halo 2 looks way better than Halo 1, yet the characters have LESS polygons.

An Unreal Tournament 2003 model can have about 2000-4000 polygons. That''s a really detailed normal figure, with armour and such. You have to make sure your game engine can handle those numbers though.

"Is a desert with 3D sand out of the question?"
3d sand? -sand dunes, of course! - seperate sand grains/crystals, no!

Nowadays you can get away with a hell of a lot of polygons. Its all a question of effective scene management (and what graphics capability your target hardware has!).
I have heard Halo 2 uses a lot less polygons, but looks even better than befoer so that goes to show polygon count isn''t everything.

For a modern game I would say between 750 to 5000 vertices for a character would be fine - but then again Im not much of an expert, just having a guess

Depending on the tools your artists are using, they could produce a high resolution mesh (hundreds of thousands of vertices, or even use high level surfaces) which could then be put through a level of detail algorithm.

But seriously, tell us what kind of experience do you AND your team have behind you and what exactly are you amiming for?

Then we can post meaningfull responses.

That kind of question looks like you are a true beginer. Don''t you think that Halo quality is a bit far fetched for now?

And another thing. You''re asking about number of polys per model. That kind of question wouldn''t be asked at an early stage of development. So, what work on the game have you done so far? What is your engine capable of?

Generaly speaking, the more polys the better, but you''ll have to give more details for a specific answer.

Actually, the information I obtain through this post won''t really be applied to my game. This is really for my own understanding as a designer. I really appreciate all the helpful replies.

quote: PLEASE POST ONLY USEFUL RESPONSES. I am not making this game alone. Don''t worry about the rest of my project and please don''t waste my time.

I''m just afraid that it''s you who''s wasting everyone''s and your own time, as it''s very unlikely you''ll ever get anything done, or others to work for you without having any experience.
Halo quality, can be done, but again, unlikely you''ll find anyone that can do that willing to work for you.

Anyways, polycounts depend of the engine your using, without knowing that, noone can really help you. Does it have portals, antiportals, zones, LODs ...or like said bumpmapping or normal mapping/polybump ?
How many polygons can the engine have in screen at once ?

Also, the release date is relatively important as you have to guess what systems will be actual at that time so you can work up to those specs.

To just throw out some numbers, characters nowadays are around 2000-3000 polys, end bosses like that spider have usually up to twice the character polycounts.
It all depends of course of what you have in screen at that time, since the world around adds to the polycount too.

A tree could be up to 300polys, depending how many you want to use = how many you''d have in screen at once, it all always comes down to that.
Some engines do well with 100k polygons in screen, others with 50k, depending of the above features (LOD, portals etc) and of course the quality of the rendering code.

3D sand sure is out of question heh.


-You guy are aware of how many wannabe designers, that think have a great idea, are out there, and that they never get anything done. Unless you can model or code yourself it won''t work.

Why don''t some of you guys lay the fuck off, it was an innocent question, and I really doubt any of you can speak for yourselves anyway.



To the poster.

I would recommend between 350 and 5000 polygons, but it really depends on your engine, and your target system.

If you are using a pre-made ghetto fly engine like genesis then I wouldn''t recommend much more than 400-450 polys for any one model. However, if you are using fancy industry standard technology supplied by, say for example Bigworld then the number of polys you can use on a per-model basis, could skyrocket as high as 5000 polys per model.

If your ''team'' is writing its own engine, and you are new to game development I would suggest you keep it simple, and keep the poly count as low as possible, and then slowly optimize and edit your code to allow for more polys.

Hopefully that helps you out a little.


Cheers,

raymondo

As others have said, the number of polygons depends on the circumstances. If you are doing stencil shadows, that's actually a lot of triangles that aren't even "seen". I am a hobby game developer, but my advice would be to find a target polygon count for the entire scene and then break it up based on how many characters and how much geometry is visible at one time.

According to Beyond3D the new 3dMark03 "Mother Nature" benchmark has "Approximately 780,000 polygons ... per frame." This is the most intense scene in the benchmark and probably doesn't run well on todays high end cards, but this number will be achievable in a few years.

A more realistic number for todays high end cards might be closer to 100,000 - 200,000. And that's still with a pretty good engine. Your characters will look great, but that's not many grains of sand.

EDIT: added clickable link


--
http://www.3dcgi.com/


[edited by - 3dcgi on February 13, 2003 11:22:43 PM]

[edited by - 3dcgi on February 13, 2003 11:23:24 PM]