how many polygons does a character need to be in order to get it in the engine?
There’s not really a limit. You have to consider the rest of the things that will be going on in the engine, like the poly count for the environment along with textures and the number of objects. Usually you just try to shoot for good performance, you can start with large textures and switch them out for lower ones if you need to increase performance.
For characters, these days you can do a pretty high poly count, maybe 20,000-50,000 though again, depending on what you’re doing.
so if i have a human, soldier that is 59,000 di yiu think it would work? thanks for the answer, really helpful
Yeah, that’ll work.
To answer your earlier question: You sound like you’re asking “What’s the minimum number of triangles I can have in a static mesh?” and the answer is 1.
Whats the minimum number of triangles a “Character” needs? Zero. You can create game characters which don’t have an attached static mesh (which may be common for player controllable cameras).
You might be asking “What is the maximum number of triangles I can have in a static mesh?”
I think the answer to that is very dependent on what your hardware can support, but you can have millions of triangles on the screen at once. There is a finite number of triangles you can render before you start running into performance issues though, so what you need to be asking yourself is “How important is rendering the character in game compared to rendering the rest of the game objects?” and portion your triangle budget accordingly. You can also create some lower level of detail versions of a mesh and set those in the LOD portion of an object. UE4 will take care of the rest.
Really though, you’ll want to put a full scene from your game onto multiple computers (or your target platform) and just look at how the performance goes and adjust from there. 59k triangles may be just fine if your scene isn’t complex, or it may be too much if it is (ie, you have 100 characters each with 59k tris).