I'm interested in creating some characters for a 3D fighting game once I finish my exams and I need some advice.. - Provided I was planning on putting together character models with the level of detail (polygon) comparable to games like Soul Calibur 3 or Tekken 4, how many polys would we be talking about approximately? - Also how many textures per model would be suitable and to what resolution? Bearing in minds the game won't have anywhere near as detailed environments as are in the example titles mentioned above, i'm looking at what kind of figures are appropriate to allow the game to run on a wide range of machines? I would be most grateful towards any advice or help anyone can offer.. Thankyou!

in a fighting game where you generally only have 2 characters on screen at the same time you can probably use around 2000-3000 polygons / character without any problems even on low end machines.

I'd say 10k - 15k poly characters should be ok. Fill rate's getting to be a limiting factor these days, as well as the good old number draw calls.

If there's only 2 chars on screen, you can really up the detail.

I read on Bungie's website that when they were requested textures and models for the Spartan for DOA4, they didn't have anything high enough resolution or high enough polycount to give to Team Ninja, so they had to recreate things from scratch. A fighting game generally only has two characters with generally relatively static backgrounds, so the polycounts of the characters are going to be enormouse ... most certainly well over 10,000 each.

Thnx for the heads up guys!

Looks like I can pretty much run away with myself and put together some very detailed chracters..

I don't think i'll be going as far as 10k polys per character though purely because I may decide to implement some shaders later (since the game will be built using DirectX 9) but I wanna see how far I can go in terms of a nice overall presentation without..

Anymore info on texture sizes (especially for models with such vast poly counts) would be useful..

Thnx

Are you serious? 3k poly in year 2006?!!

XBOX 1 runs with DirectX 8.1 and Dead Or Alive 3 has at least 15.000 polygons per character if not even more! And Tekken 4 & 5 on Sony Playstation 2, which capabilities are much worse than XBOX> polycount per character also 15k!

And everything runs on DX8 or worser! If you are aiming for DX9 and at least Pixel Shader 2 technology, you should take AT A MINIMUM 15K if not 30K or 80K.

There are many demos, like NVIDIA Dawn, that runs with GeForce FX5200 under OpenGL and has about 120.000 polygons (year 2001!). And for example ATI Ruby demo: Ninja Characters about 20K polygons and Main character arround 80K polygons!

Take a look on the NVIDIA Demo page or perhaps ATI demos! You can also download the videos! Smal infos:
- Quake 1: 700 triangles/player
- Half-Life1: 1200/1500 triangles/player
- Half-Life2: 8000 triangles/player in closest LOD, 2000 triangles in far log
- Max-Payne1: 1500 triangles
- Max-Payne2: 4000 triangles for every character

This games are at least 3 years old, so 15K should be the minimum.

From experience 10k polys is more than enough.

Polycount won't really matter to a fighting engine (Could you blow out 100k poly's even if you really wanted to?).

It's really more for modelling, it's a lot easier to handle about 10k polys, than it is anything a lot more, or a lot less than that.

You will get better results if you consentrate on texturing instead. That said, you should aim for about 1 or 2 textures per model. Once again, you could go nuts, but it's a lot easier to handle less textures, creation wise.

These days, you can go with 1024x1024 textures no worries at all, especially with a fighting game. Even then, might be overkill for your needs.


But in the end, just stick with what your comfortable with. With only about 2 characters on screen, you should be fine at any detail level. Remember, you will probably be making a handlefull of characters, just don't get bogged down on one.

Thnx for the heads up guys!

I was a little scared when Samurai Jack began talking about poly counts upwards of 50K!! I'm sure they'd look great and all but wouldn't it become a pain in the arse setting up all the UVW maps for each character!?!?

Anyways I was thinking about character colours and was wondering..

I'm hoping top include the ability to allow the player to choose an outfit colour for each character out of a predefined set of outfits. My question is would it be more efficient to handle these as seperate textures entirely or to try and get the engine to recolour the outfits dynamically?

UVing a 50k high poly character is generally the same as a 5k low poly character. The graphical/production hurdles from high poly game art mostly have to do with animation/simulation.

If each character has different outfits, each outfit should be a seperate texture (and would also have to be a seperate model). If the texture doesn't need a new model, still use a seperate texture. If its just a recoloring of an existing texture (changing it from blue to red) then use the same texture and do it via the engine/shaders by multiplying? it with a 255,0,0 thing (pure Red). But this still isn't going to look so good, you would probably want to recolor it in Photoshop so you can get better detail (and not saturate/change all areas of the original texture), and use a seperate texture.

thnx professor!

(Wow that sounded familiar.. like i'm in school..)