Hello. I wonder how many polygons a game model can consist of, and whether it can exceed a million. For example, the knife model that is to appear in the game. Will it not be too much? What value do other games use?
In Robo Recall the limit was 2.2M polygons for the environment with characters. So yes, more than a million polygons for a knife are most likely way too much if you want to display also other objects. Why should a knife have so much polygons?
So how much would you recommend for a model? I have now seen that the new game from riot Valorant, uses 10-50k for one character model, and the models look very smooth, and I don’t know how they do it, I thought it was due to the large number of polygons per model.
Just reporting from some recent observations/tests:
One naked DAZ3d model is around <35k triangles and it looks very smooth, even in close up view. So you won’t need a higher polycount, esp. if the model mesh topology is of perfect quality.
MakeHuman models have >46k triangles, look smooth as well, but the standard topology it comes with, is not as efficient as in DAZ (you can always create your own one as the tool allows for a choice between multiple topologies).
Character hair can look good from <3k tris. The maximum I would go here is up to 10k for a hairstyle. Sims 3 hair is a good example for hair that is low poly and still looks good (in UE as well).
As for vehicles, I’ve seen tractors from farm sim with a tricount of <79k, trailers with ~75k and a combine harvester with a tricount of 100k or even 200k (all an absolute overkill and unnecessary).
Normally vehicles look good with a polycount from 15-30k. Most important are texture quality and good normal maps.
Concerning architectural elements, tools, furniture you should go for as few polys as possible and use normal maps instead as there is no advantage of using more polys than absolutely necessary. (like 1-2k tris for an advanced (special style like vintage) chair or table maximum and <100 tris for a simple realistic table and ~300 tris for a simple realistic chair).
With trees 10k-20k tris should be enough for one tree (at least with TreeIt trees). Farm animals like chicken or pigs can look good with 1k-3k tris.
But you can always use lods, distance based culling and ue culls everything what’s hidden from your view anyway…
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They look smooth because of smooth shading.
You can build pretty well detailes spaceships with just 200-500k polygons, and i am talking about the bigger ones, like Battlestars, Basestars and Star Destroyers, with their endless amount of greebles for the superstructure 
Like this model here comes with 241k polys:
It has no sense for me to define how many triangles you have to create a model with, because the performance of your games depend on so many factors.
- Lighting
- Shadows
- GI or not
- Raytrace or not
- Landscape
- Textures size
- Texture channels
- How many objects
- Code
- Polygons
- How many characters
- Video resolution
… and so on
I’m looking for a benchmark to simulate performance on different machines and consoles, that might help
My half professional view is try to do maximum low ! It means:
First select target platform (if it’s Mobile/Handled go minimum, pc/consoles you can go for more)
Second is what are you want to model : if it’s something detailed like human or armor or horse for example and you plan to use it like most important character you can do 10-20k+ on easy !
On the other hand if it’s random chicken on farm than you should not past 1-2k.
The last question How many of this models would be simultaneously in game (in one screen space for example! )
If 10 than you probably good even if it’s 20k+ models.
But if it’s just 1k model and you want 10000 of them than you should go for less of this models!
Overall it’s game of performance and visuality where you always have to go for better performance and if at the end in final testing you have room for better visuals you can improve models!
Some info from past :
Kratos in GOW 3 PS3 was ~35k
Crysis main character was ~45k
GT5 had cars ~100-150k
Leon in RE4(2005-6 game ) was 6-8k.