Hi,
I created my character in Blender with 480k polygons and I managed to reduce it to 140k.
I have a few question.
(1) Can Ue4 handle 100k polygons without big performance drop?
(2) Is there any good(free)software to reduce poly count?
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Yes, it’s pretty common to see characters at 40-80k currently in game. But you don’t want every character that high poly unless it’s needed.
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Doing retopology would be the best option, any automated solution is going to give poor topology for animation.
Another practice that I’ve seen is to bake the high poly mesh to a normal map for the med-low poly mesh.
Another also is Decimation which reduces the poly count yet I have not personally used it.
One free tool to reduce polycount is called Reducto by Wayne Robson. It is geared toward taking massive tens of millions of Polygon models and reducing them without losing their visual quality. He does Mudbox Sculpts for movies, televison and games.
http://psychocore.com/index2.html
And yes, manually creating a retopolized model has many benefits, but this can get you most of the way there to help getting your prototyping done. It is important to note that this tool exports all triangles, however, which isn’t so bad for games anyway.
Thank you guys for the tips. 
ZacD, what games are u playing with 80k characters? lol
Learn about normal map generating … you dont ever need a character that is over 100k in poly. Thats just nuts… you can make a 10k model look like a million poly model with normal maps and stuff.
Also on another note, zbrush has some awesome tools for lowering poly counts and retopologizing as well.
I heard of this software but I forgot the name.
Ryse:Son of Rome = 80k
Star citizen = 100k
Crysis 3 = 60k
I now how to bake normal maps but I don’t get the results that I want. 
Yea that is crazy… i hear batman arkham knight character polys are like 3x-4x of what arkham citys character poly were and those were around 10,000-15000… alls i got to say is LODs are your friend.
I didn’t thing about LODs at all.Thank you for reminding me.
140k polys i assume it is not animated. If its not then you can easily reduce its polycount with many LOD crunchers out there. ProOptimized in 3ds max, Zbrush has retriangulation, Mudbox has, Simplygon in UE4 (with license i believe)…140k polys if you only have 1 character per view it should be alright. If you want to render more of them youll need to optimize.
100k polys per character honestly i have no idea why would one use so many polygons, at 15k 99% of characters can have all poly edges hiden with proper normal map. It is possible that those games counted above used that many polys maybe due to clothing (physix based), or some other dynamically based mesh components. For regular characters anything above 15k just doesnt make sense. Unless you are playing game under microscope you will not notice it
Hahahaha
I strongly disagree, 15k is definitely a big point of diminishing returns, but for a 3rd person game or a cinematic model used for cut scenes and close ups, 80k makes a big difference. Especially at higher resolutions like 1440p and 4k. You want to avoid triangles smaller than a pixel, but otherwise, tri count no longer as a huge impact on performance, as long as it’s reasonable and optimized for games. Here’s a 100k model from the outsourcing company ArtBully, created as a test of making AAA hero characters http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=155586 and a 3d interactive view http://work3.fx81.com/persian_warrior/persian_warrior.html It definitely looks better than Geralt from Witcher 2, which used about 20-32k tris depending on the outfit, in that game you can often see the edges of polygons on the models during close up cut scenes, particularly around edges of objects, sleeves, colors, and ears.
Yes you got point there. For custscenes and 4k screens that would make sense. If normal texture are maxed out on their size/details and if one has option to go into polys more why not.
Mesh lab did pretty good job of reducing polys but not good enough. I decided to reduce poly count manualy and I’m happy with the result,before my character had 140.000 polys and now it has 50.000 and it didn’t lose any quality. 
YOu mentioned blender and I have no idea if you used it to reduce polys, but having tried myself, its a nightmare as there is no ‘reduce’ brush specifically. In general I avoid blender, because while it would be just fine in general for 75k tri or less objects ( even if you have a good rig most likely), just try and edit something in the 350k tri or so range, blender slows to a crawl, and my system is far from weak. Yes, its a known issue, blender’s viewport is very slow due to OLD gl code and I have no idea what the status us on fixing it, I just know its still a slug even with the 2.75a release, so its on my pass list atm. Btw, I’m not hating on blender, its just a fact, and noted all over the blenderartist forums.
If nothing else but future reference, you can reduce polys in sculptris, and btw doing so its just amazing, and gives you manual control with the reduce brush, and its free.
Given the size of your original mesh, I’d love to know what kind of system you have that allowed you to work, lag free ? with a 480k mesh, and yes I have VBO on and I’m using opencl with my amd card.
I’m asking only because I saw someone on BA forums with the same troubles as others, and he had a GTX 580.
There is also something called meshmixer which is also free, and does a very good job as well.
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After doing a lot of testing in Unreal 4 our group has upped our player model budget to 200k excluding hair and weapons. As a number 200k is nothing as far as GPU rendering goes and it’s become more or less about materials where special attention needs to be paid.
Granted you don’t want to go nuts and have a few hundred characters being rendered at the same time at 100k, that’s just being wasteful, but as best practice it’s easier to take to much an make it less than it is to try and make not enough do more.
But if it’s your stuff then due diligences requires constant testing based on know benchmarks.
Interesting test if your interested and if you can stick it out to the end it’s excessive use of materials where the performance hit has relocated to. 
I have Gpu Amd Radeon R9 270 2 Gb
Cpu Amd Phenom x3 2.9 Ghz
6Gb RAM
If I separate my character into multiple objects I can work with no lag but if my character is one object it is too laggy. 
Way more than that man. WAY more. I think an average ship is 500k ish. I have several over 1-2million.
140k is pocket change for modern graphics engines.