Hi Ironbelly,
Thanks for heads-up. The models are for a top-down RTS with possible worst case scenario in 4 player mode of up to 400 to 600 characters on screen at once and most of the time the characters will be viewed at distance, hence really tying the poly count down. The guard image at the top is 1,900 polys and doesn’t have any normal mapping on it yet for extra details, and to be fair it looks pretty good when playing through in the editor. The big worry I’ve got at the moment is how fast is unreal at transitioning between character LODs (as this is an RTS, and not FPS, the player will be zooming in, out, and across the map at as high speeds as possible. Plus keeping the poly count down might increase the scope of allowing players to have more units, possibly improving game play. You’re right though I think we need to run a bench-mark test soon to see how far we can push it (although we haven’t got any of our lower LOD models yet)(aahh so much to do)… Maybe, if UE4 is really fast at LOD transitions and it helps the modeller we might be able to push the top-LOD up to 3,000 or 4,000 polys for real close-ups (could help in reusing the models for other projects). What poly count would work for you/you suggest for the above?
Do you know where a standard benchmark poly-budget sits at the moment for PC/console, it can be quite hard to tie the numbers down (but seems PS3/XBox360/equiv PC ~300-500 million polys per second maximum? - so max: 50 max-LOD chars on screen at closest zoom (would fill the screen) 2,000p poly count per character: 2000*50 = 100,000, 50fps = 500,000pps, plus diffuse, normal, specular, dynamic shading pass, maybe 2Mpps? plus a lot of head room for reloading graphics buffers for fast scrolling, zooming, and LOD changes 10Mpps? Plus I’m sure there’s loads of other stuff I’m not taking into account. So think I could push character budget up to 5,000p, plus equipment 6,000p => 30Mpps