Hello. I have a small question, how many polygons is a reasonable amount for a weapon ( assault rifle ) in a game? I'm making this futuristic styled "ak-47" in 3ds max 7 but it's not looking that great. Will using turbosmooth be ok? Thanks. [Edited by - yoporahh on December 22, 2007 10:48:37 AM]

generally, no one can ever give you an exact answer, and if they do that figure is useless to everyone but the person who gave it to you. Polygon usage is sort of a game of balance, a balance with the rest of the game's assets. As such, each polygon figure is unique to each game (generally speaking). However there is a general rule of thumb, the more screen space the object takes up the more polygons it should have.
However, using turbosmooth is usually not a good idea and is usually only used to hide poor modeling. To be brutally honest, if the model looks bad before turbosmooth, it will not look any better with it and will only add to its polycount.

If you're a programmer:
Who cares about whether it is smooth or not? Just throw it in the engine and see if it works. If it runs slowly, ditch the smoothing.

I could tell you that a first person model in a modern FPS using an efficient engine can easily be a few thousand polygons, but in a year will that matter? Standards change constantly. Focus on testing your game to see what runs well.

If you're an artist:
Any sort of automatic smoothing is bad practice for an in-game model. Smoothing is for pre-rendered assets and high-res models to bake normal maps off of. You can always achieve the same look without it using other methods (ie. normal maps).

why would you want to use mesh smoothing on anything mechanical?

Quote:

Original post by Kaze why would you want to use mesh smoothing on anything mechanical?

Thanks for your replies. Kaze, I was going to use toorbusmooth on the top piece, so that it looks curved, not sharp. Because the weapon is in the future, its not as sharp or mechanical as it is today. I guess I'll just work more on the model itself. Thanks everyone.

if you just want to smooth out a few pieces beveling would probably get better results than mesh smoothing and create fewer extra polygons

Quote:

Original post by Kaze if you just want to smooth out a few pieces beveling would probably get better results than mesh smoothing and create fewer extra polygons

Didn't know that, thanks :)

I think that using textures well can greatly improve the look of a model without drastically increasing the number of polys. If you have a curve that has only a few (4 to 8) points then you can use a texture with some smooth lighting effects on it to make it look smoother. A good example is a pipe. I have made 3D pipes using only 3 sides but textured them with a simple gradient image to make it look like it's smooth.

Thanks XTAL