When you build a character, what sort of limits do you place on yourself for their polygons? I am building my first set of characters, and each one has around 15,000 polys. I am using poser characters, altered into obj's. They look really great, and 15,000 doesn't seem too high as there will never be more than 5 characters in the game world. But I am interested to know how many polys you use in your characters. How many poly's do you think is a reasonable total for the entire scene (including everything) while still having the game run on a fairly bog standard card? I know there is no right answer to this, just looking for people's opinions. Also, are there any effective (but easy) ways to reduce polygon numbers? Obviously the object will appear less "nice" but Iam interested. Currently I only own poser and milkshape. [edited by - Leggyguy on May 4, 2002 2:11:06 PM] [edited by - Leggyguy on May 4, 2002 2:14:55 PM]

15,000 seems extremely high depending on the type of game you are developing and the type of animation. Quake3:Arena uses ~700 polys per character. If its a FPS then 15,000 is definately too extreme...

as haro says, it depends on how you animate them. do CPU intensive (or even not) animation, and you won''t do well for anything about a few k... do GPU animation - vertex weighting, or DX8 offers vertex matrix indexing, which sounds rather tempting, and you could go nuts. Most chips less than 2.5 years old that are decent quality can manage about 4 million tris/sec if programmed well, it''s only when the CPU gets involved on per triangle levels that things slow down dramatically. 15k over 5 characters = 75k tris, which is a fair bit. But if you write it well, you can have your scenes pushing 200k without slowdown even on past-it''s-prime hardware (my GF1, for example, I have pulled 8 mil/tris/sec from in a complex scene - not just a mesh)

Unreal 2 will have 3500 to 10000 polygons per character, just to give an indication...