Next gen models

Hello,

This question is for modellers working on games for the new consoles...or people in the know I guess.

Are poly counts for models higher? More Then 10,000 tris for hero characters, or is the texture resolution just higher now?

Thanks

Games are already at more than 10,000 tris for characters. But you could definitely increase that for the next gen. As an example for Star Citizen they have a character at 100,000. You could even setup characters for real time tessellation which will smooth the model beyond what it already is.
The next gen consoles have a lot more memory than last gen so they should be capable of quite a bit.

I sometimes wonder about that. Does anyone know who decides on the tri count? Do the console makers supply guidelines to the games makers, or do the games makers experiment and see how high they can push the tri count and texture quality/file sizes before the game starts to slow the console down?

There is only a certain amount of memory to go around, so different parts of the game are split into different budgets.

For example, if you want your hero character to be 20.000 polys you'll have to scale back on something else.

There's not really any guidelines. Until the game is finished you don't know what all the objects are so your environment might not have that much to it which means you could have more detailed characters or it could be the other way. For the most part you keep it as low as possible and just guess. I think with say games like The Last of Us they were probably more particular since the PS3 doesn't have very much memory.

Check out this video. Thats current gen.

Yea,
While playing The Last of Us. It made me curios how much more are they going to bump it up. Since it already looks good. I was thinking sandbox games, with the detail of The Last of Us will be the norm.

kind of depends on the environment detail and the number of characters on a screen at any given time.

At this point I think people are going to start going nuts now that the memory has jumped such a huge amount. All the careful planning from the past will start getting ignored until people hit the cap and will then start learning how to optimize all over again.

Here's an interesting thread with tons of characters and their polycount from current and next-gen games:

http://beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43975&page=55

The engine and the game style and requirements dictate it, usually on grounds of what the lowest hardware specs can deal with.

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