Hey guys, new to the forums, hope to stick around cuz this looks like an awesome community. My first question is, is there any website out there that will define what today's polycount limit is for computers, that includes with textures, all things like bumpmaps included and such. Typically, how many polys in one scene do you think they used in doom3 or hl2? I got this semi-internship job and i have no clue really what is a good poly count for my object and whats not. O this is for an mmorpg so i guess since there will be hundreds of players on your screen at onces its gotta be able to handle it...

It really depends on your target platform and how the engine is set up.

For instance, are you modeling props/weapons/characters? (I'm assuming they won't put you on characters during an internship unless you're p-awesome)? For instance, scenery stuff may already have some sort of LOD (level of detail) scheme in which case polygon count won't be too important. Characters depend on how many are on screen at once (in your case a lot) and how they're skinned/animated.

If the game is planning on targeting a wide variety of hardware (read: old), or if like in Doom certain in-game requirements require preclude high poly counts (in Doom's case because of their stencil shadowing technique), you've gotta set your sights low.

All that said, they'll tell you what you're poly budget is and if not, ask.

Hi,

If you want to get an idea of what HL2 polycount is, start up it's Model View, it comes with the game and load up some character models into it. It will give you a good idea of the complexity of the models and also show you the polygon count.

Dan

Have you checked out Polycount yet ?
They are a website dedicated to player models for FPS. Usually they have this sort of info, and otherwise you can just check out the models for your favourite game and see what the trend is. They also have useful articles. Although I havent visited in a little while so some stuff might be out of date.
Still, hope it helps? :-)