Current Industry Poly Count?

[banzato]

Depends on the style of the game. For exemple, in a game like Age of Empires 3 you don´t need to much polys (1000 to 2500) becouse the characters are far away. But in a Half Life 2 you can use more polys (4000 to 6000) becouse the characters are close to the screen. But in my opnion it´s bether a great texture on a average model instead a great model with a average texture. In games texture is very important, sometimes they use normal maps, that is very important to see low poly models with a high quality look. But this is another history.

Cya.

[banzato]

Just to complete, if you want more info about it just use winrar to open files of games. For exemple, if you have Half Life 2 you can check the models and textures in your 3d program.

[Pollo]

Just so you know, reportedly with the Unreal 3 engine (and therefore, Gears of War, UT2007, etc.) the poly count may be in the hundres of thousands if not around 1 million. I was just reading about this a few days ago :)

[AnOldFriend]

Pollo: I am not 100% sure but I think those high detailed models you are reffering to are only for the normal maps. If you look at the Unreal website you will see a model of some kind of creature that is 2 million or so polygons but if you look at the game model its not nearly as detailed, like I said the 2 million poly model is for the normal map of the lowpoly model.

[Wafer]

Does anyone know what the average poly count for gaming main characters, villains, environments and weapons. If not does anyone know where I can find that info.

An interesting question. Polycounts/triangle counts aren't quite so important these days, aren't such a good indicator. Other things are thrown into this mix, like tri stripping, number and size of textures, UVs , verticies etc. Pure polycounts don't really tell you so much anymore.

You could have a 10,000 polygon character with norm maps, spec maps, cloth, dynamic hair and all sorts of other stuff going on... or for the same render time, you could have a 1,000,000 polygon character with just a colour map and no goodies.

If you`re designing and modeling a character, I`d advise you create it as optimally as possible for the distance on screen you are going to see this character. If you start to see any angular areas, add more detail there.

Hope this helps
Kevin Wafer
www.kevinwafer.com (http://www.kevinwafer.com)

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