I am building a Battle station in space, it consists of roughly 4000 polys for the exterior. The interior will load when they enter the dock bay. What is a good number to keep it within range of? I still would like to add some details such as guns and various pop outs. Thanks to anyone who can give me some solid info.

It depends a lot on what is your target hardware, on the shaders and other effects which depends on triangle count. But my opinion considering you're targeting todays common hardware and your game is using standard rendering methods and techniques 4000 triangles(hm you said polys...you shouldn't measure poly count but triangle count because one poly can have several thousand triangles inside =) ) is probably very low poly.

I'm sorry, it is 4004 triangles. The object is supposed to be really huge even compared to a large battle ship. (Air craft carrier size). I am learning and have never made an object this size yet. It will still have quite a few things to make on the surface.

Quote: Original post by Spiderweb
I am building a Battle station in space, it consists of roughly 4000 polys for the exterior. The interior will load when they enter the dock bay. What is a good number to keep it within range of? I still would like to add some details such as guns and various pop outs. Thanks to anyone who can give me some solid info.

As always with this sort of thing, it depends, 4000 triangles is almost nothing on modern hardware, If that battlestation is the only thing you'll have on screen you can use alot more without worrying about it.

Thanks for the input. Well it is in space and the only real object that stays in view will be the skybox and some other crafts. Landscapes, trees, grasses, logs ect wont be things eating up my poly limits. Another question for you if you dont mind. What skill level do you rate yourself at? I have some other questions Id like to shoot by ya.

My car game uses more than 10k triangles per vehicle.

Triangle-count isn't as important as it used to be, now days it matters more how many batches you are drawing. Game engines can only draw triangles in the same batch if they are using the same materials/shaders/etc...

E.g. One batch of 20k triangles might be just as fast as two batches of 5k triangles...
Drawing triangles is fast, but preparing a batch of triangles is slow.

True. Thanks