Hi, Now, i making 3d lowpoly character with 3ds max 9.0 for exporting to 3d game studio engine, what is the maximum number of faces to work good in game engine ..? now my character has 864 faces, and with MeshSmooth modifer has 3400 faces, i hope guide me.. regards newmfa

that should be good enough, I wouldn't use meshsmooth though, I would just use a smoothing group on it. You would keep the 864 faces, but the character would look smoother.

It depends on a few factors such as what engine it is and how big you want your scene to be, but it is not uncommon for a next gen game to have characters in the thousands of polygons (3000 - 6000).

A few things you should probably focus on to optimize your artwork is make sure you have several Levels Of Detail. This way you can manage having more models on the screen at once because the engine will manage the amount of polygons to be displayed based on distance to the camera.

Another thing you should look into is Normal mapping your characters. I am not an artist, so I don't know the specifics of creating one, but basically I have been told that you create a high poly (like 100,000+ poly) model that you can then "bake" onto the lower poly model (1,000 poly). That makes it look a lot better while still saving on the poly count.

Normal mapping is really nice, but getting it right is super time consuming. You have to ajust a "cage" onto the lower poly character, create the high poly, Bake the normal map, apply the normal map, spend 3 hours adjusting the cage again...

Battlefield 1942, a game from around released about 6 years ago had characters of around 1500 polies, and it could render up to 64 of them. It looked pretty good for the time, too.

That said, if your character looks good, don't boost polies for the sake of it.

Just to clear up a few things in this thread. While it is true that an engine can make a difference in performance, this is not going to be an indicator. The far better indicator as to your budget (polycount, whatever you want to call it) is going to be the hardware you expect to target. You GFX card, more specifically, is the number one factor in determining poly count. A great engine on an older card will still be limited, regardless of what the engine itself can handle. Again, the gfx cards are the major bottleneck.

So, when determining your polycount, you need to have an engine and your "Minimum spec" card in hand, so you can determine what is playable and what is not. It is becoming more common to have a stricter scene polycount while being a little more lenient in the character polycount.

Most newer cards don't have the limitations that older cards had in this respect. With this in mind, your polycount budget itself isn't quite as useful as it used to be. This is not to say that you don't need one, but it is important that you keep an eye on other factors as well. The shader model version on a card will play important rolls, since a shader is required to utilize a normal map or offset/parallax map. Then, you need to keep an eye on your texture size, and the number of batches will be in a scene. If you don't yet know what batches are, or how they come into play, you probably don't need to be worrying much about polycount at this point, especially if you are targetting newer cards (like for a mod of a current game).

As far as the time consuming thing goes, any top quality art takes time. While it is true that without something like a normal map, you can create something much quicker, you should also remember that this is not top-notch. If you are after the AAA quality, get used to taking days, weeks, or months on 1 model.

Hope that helps clear up some things. If you really don't want to get into the fine details of it, and are after a "safe" number just to keep in mind, < 6000 is safe, and < 3000 is safer.

Many Thanks for helping me, your info. much useful..

i want to know something important, in 3ds max 9.0 is there a way to modeling my character in High Details and decrese this details to LowPoly but with smooth look.. ?

what is meaning of normal mappping is this a modifier in 3ds max 9.0 ..?

newmfa

Quote: Original post by newmfa
Many Thanks for helping me, your info. much useful..

i want to know something important, in 3ds max 9.0 is there a way to modeling my character in High Details and decrese this details to LowPoly but with smooth look.. ?

what is meaning of normal mappping is this a modifier in 3ds max 9.0 ..?

newmfa

Take a look here, that should give you a good start. Though i have yet to start on the mesh and polygon portions of the topic, it should be a good intro into the textures at least.