How Many Poly's to make a decent Aircraft?

[Dreamstar]

found some 3ds models on the net... can remember where or id post a link... anyhoo there were some half decent models in there.. a B-1B, B-2, F-22 with cockpit, the 747 aitborne laser... Blackbird to name a few... the only thing is they are relativly low poly models... the B-1B is about 2500 i think... i know its not enough for a high quality model.. but how much is?

[Guest capun]

Now these are just my own personal thoughts.

 

Bottom line is that to a certain degree you cannot equate the number of poly's to the quality of the model. The model may have tires with 3000 polys each but the rest of the model may look crappy.

 

You can find really good models that are fairly low poly and high poly models that are not. It's where you spent your polys what counts.

 

Also a good texture can hide some of the model defects to a point.

 

2500 polys for a B1B model does seem a bit low and you may not have enough detail, it may look a bit blocky, it may not have wheel wells, bomb bays, etc.

 

What eats up polys are the details and meshes that are rounded, for example a flat sided fuselage part may be done with one poly but if it is curved the poly count will depend on the radius and how smooth you want it to look.

 

Tires are another example, you can make a simpler model but it may look more polygonal than a circle if you skimp on the polys.

 

FE models seem to have a higher poly counts due to all of that braces and wire rigging.

 

From the SFP1 game engine side, the original target (few years old) was around 6000 polys if I remember correct, but that was targetted for older hardware. Now a days a decent midrange system can tackle models as much as 50000 polys with a decent fps. It would run fine with just your plane flying but with several planes in combat may be a different story.

 

According to TK the biggest fps hog is the resolution and number of texture maps.

 

Long Answer to a short question :)

[Fubar512]

The average SF aircraft model poly-count today hovers around 10,000.