Poly Count Guidelines?

[jtin]

Title says it all... what's the general target for polycounts in both aircraft and groundobject models?

 

There is a little bit on it in the exporter notes, but as I understand it, are those a bit outdated and conservative by today's standards?

[+FastCargo]

Well, I can tell you, for my midrange computer...polys for aircraft really isn't the issue as much as textures. Polys help of course.

 

Anyway, I think you'll tend to find high end is 40k polys, 20k is comfortable. At least, that's what I've seen.

 

FC

[+Julhelm]

20k is high for a plane. 40k would be nuts. I'd say the optimum is somewhere around 10k. The most important thing is to have an even level of detail all around, and to optimise this for how it's mostly seen ingame. It serves no real purpose other than self-fellating to model stuff like individual bolts and nuts on the undercarriage when you have to literally zoom in max to notice them. If you can fake geometric detail with texture work, do it.

[+russouk2004]

As Julheim says.....get away with as few polys as possible...saves you work mapping too... :)

if u can paint it so it looks like a bolt...do it...lol...theres loadsa textures out there in interweb world...ha

thats what I did with p47 N...save making metal textures I found bare metal photos and copy n pasted bits into various panels on the jug...so no weathering or wear n tear was needed,well,very little...really all I did to this was add rivets etc...a tad of weathering,rust oil etc....

Edited August 16, 2009 by russouk2004

[jtin]

Gotcha (nice skin btw)

 

What about the LODs? On the second level, landing gear, cut out shapes, small bulges, etc should be removed, right?

 

And anything on ground objects?

[+russouk2004]

on 2nd lods...instead of say...landing gear legs having all the parts u see close up on 1st lod...u can get away with just the leg and wheel...for example

[+Julhelm]

Also it greatly helps performance if you can use as few maps as possible. It's easier for the engine to load just one 2048^2048 than four 1024^1024 bitmaps, and the more texture space you can reuse (why map two similar struts separately if they can use the same piece of texture and look convincing?) the better.