Number of Polys in Video Games

How many polys do a regular full body character has in most video games today?
Do a lot of the companies just use low poly characters and rely on sculpting software programs like Mudbox and Zbrush for details?

http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/...cal-Poly-Counts

So you can see the amount of polys per character in PS2 games was around 10,000 polys, and for PS3 - 50,000 polys. So we can expect characters with the upcoming PS4 to have around 200-300k polys.
But it's for main characters, for the secondary you can have 4 times less or so.

Zbrush is the standard for any game which considers the current-gen (PS3). Only old engines, which can't use normal maps or can't afford digital artists, who can make zbrush models, still rely on diffuse only. But I think those are just small PC companies, which make some add-ons for old games like fly simulators, which sell anyway. They are tied to old engines of the main title. Or just don't care about it.

I've noticed even some games that only use diffuse map end up incorporating a sculpting tool to build a high poly model, and then projecting a complete map to capture details for their diffuse texture.

That's a nice idea. Also you can repose and fix low-poly meshes using Zbrush as well much faster and more efficiently.

Well having worked on several AAA titles thus far I can definitely say a 50k character is an extreme rarity on PS3. Probably most likely in a game that has no characters other than the main and a couple sidekicks. A main character in a game like AC which is full of chars is around 14k, 20k at most. The majority of cinematic characters are more like 8k -10k - while NPCs around 5-6 k. I'd expect the next gen characters to be 50-60k, definitely not 200k..

Thank you for the first-hand input, it's always more precise. 50k, plus normal mapping should give very smooth characters.

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