Hi, I was wondering what is the desired polygon count for modern games (say on the level of Half-Life 2, Oblivion and better) - especially for characters, faces and objects (eg. furniture, weapons). Thx in advance for the info,

no one can give you an exact poly count to follow, because it depends. will your game need more emphasis on the environment or characters? how many characters/moveable objects do you have in your game that have the possibiit of being on screen at once. what is your target hardware? what is your target platform? what kind of engine do you have? what kind of game environments do you have? all of these questions and much more must be considered when picking the max poly limit for each type of model.
the mainthing is, is that more of your poly budget will go to what has more importance to you game. in my game we have the possibility of having 16 people, and its 3rd person so you'll be seeing mostly the environment and charactes from a distance. this means that more of our total poly budget will go to environments while we also have to restrict the character models poly limit more since our game engine doesn't support lod (if it ever will).
thats just an example of my game, with yours you need to do a lot of thinking and planning to comeup with the total poly (tri) count for each mesh each artist is responsible for.
for more information go to this article.

[Edited by - Jarrod1937 on December 19, 2006 7:08:07 PM]

From the CoD2 mod manual:
We generally make 4 levels of detail for each character, at 8,000, 4,000, 1,000 and 300 triangles. We name the parts for each LoD, _8k, _4k, _1k and _300.

HL2 varies from 4k or so (one of the normal humans) to 10k or so (Alyx).

Oblivion, which doesn't use any LoD's (or, perhaps, they are dynamically generated) uses poly counts in the tens of thousands for a complete character (14k maybe?). Which is a major reason the game slows down so much. I remember seeing the table tennis game by rockstar uses 30k or so/character... or maybe not.

This question bears much less relevancy now, because there is such a discrepancy in hardware and games. Figure 5000-6000 for the minimum full character, including deformable head, equipment, hair, fingers, and all together, 2048x2048 of texture space (maybe not all one texture... but in total).

That's my estimation, at least. HL2 textures varied from 512x512 (body of the normal human), to 2048 (can't remember what but almost sure its there... maybe Alyx?). Oblivion uses 512 textures for most equipment, with mirroring UVs (one reason the art can look bland).

Poly count is not much of an issue, though. As long as you make your hi-poly assets properly, make your topology properly (good seam placement and edgeflow), and paint your textures large, you'll be fine. I have always painted my textures larger than I'd likely need them... it will be extra work, but it can also make a big difference in quality... you will need to decide whether quantity or (possibly pointless) quality is more important. If you do those things, adding in more polygons is mostly painless, as you can use the same UV layout almost, and the same hi-poly assets if you even need to re-do the normal map.

Just remember, though, it is easier to take away detail. Make your assets to a higher spec, always, and reduce.

Quote: Original post by Professor420
From the CoD2 mod manual:
We generally make 4 levels of detail for each character, at 8,000, 4,000, 1,000 and 300 triangles. We name the parts for each LoD, _8k, _4k, _1k and _300.

HL2 varies from 4k or so (one of the normal humans) to 10k or so (Alyx).

Oblivion, which doesn't use any LoD's (or, perhaps, they are dynamically generated) uses poly counts in the tens of thousands for a complete character (14k maybe?). Which is a major reason the game slows down so much. I remember seeing the table tennis game by rockstar uses 30k or so/character... or maybe not.

yes, this illustrates my point that the poly count for each model or human depends on the rest of the game (and the many other factors). games like table tennis, boxing...etc have a lot less environment details so they can pack a ton into the character models.

Quote:
I have always painted my textures larger than I'd likely need them... it will be extra work, but it can also make a big difference in quality...

really? resizing.

Yes, jarrod, I've read that link before, and he's right. Take a look at HL2 art, that has almost a Quakish-quality, ie, it's almost pixel art. You can put a tremendous amount of detail into a small texture.

What I mean by quality, was that you can often use the 2x texture for promotional purposes, small-scale demos, etc. And when you resize you are losing the fidelity of the 2x texture, but it would look almost the same as if you had painted at the smaller size originally.

Case in point, during my time on a RTW mod, I tried to have my skinners use 512 textures instead of the default 256. By the end of the game's life, computers could easily support the higher-resolution textures, and they could even have been ported to Medieval 2: Total War. Instead, the textures look relatively outdated now, and would look out of place if ported, compared to the larger-size M2TW textures. You never know what the future holds, and, especially as a hobbyist where projects can drag on and on, its often worth it to over-size things. In the worst case, you'll have better looking art for promos and demos that must eventually be scaled down.

Quote: Original post by Professor420
Yes, jarrod, I've read that link before, and he's right. Take a look at HL2 art, that has almost a Quakish-quality, ie, it's almost pixel art. You can put a tremendous amount of detail into a small texture.

What I mean by quality, was that you can often use the 2x texture for promotional purposes, small-scale demos, etc. And when you resize you are losing the fidelity of the 2x texture, but it would look almost the same as if you had painted at the smaller size originally.

Case in point, during my time on a RTW mod, I tried to have my skinners use 512 textures instead of the default 256. By the end of the game's life, computers could easily support the higher-resolution textures, and they could even have been ported to Medieval 2: Total War. Instead, the textures look relatively outdated now, and would look out of place if ported, compared to the larger-size M2TW textures. You never know what the future holds, and, especially as a hobbyist where projects can drag on and on, its often worth it to over-size things. In the worst case, you'll have better looking art for promos and demos that must eventually be scaled down.

yes, but while you may have better looking demo's and promos your actual true ingame art will suffer, unless of course like you said, by the time your project is released games may support higher res textures... but you should already be taking that into consideration when making the texture in the first place. i still say starting with the same res texture that will end up in your game is best, but i guess it is up to each artist and how they make their art, as poop said if the end result is the same then why bother?