Low poly question

[Alex18]

Hi,

I make my own models. I try to make things as low poly as possible, but I don’t want to do extreme work on baking everything.

I’m making a kichen which is low poly but won’t be baked. Textures would be baked so it won’t affect the perfomance. Mesh is the problem.
I um…made basic ground, walls, and sink, it already costed 800 poly. (mostly the sink did)
If I make window frame, cupboard, and cabinet handles, the result might be 1500 poly I guess. (without electronics)

Is that too high poly for a kitchen? I don’t want to bake all the models(it’s too much work).
I can make kitchen with 500 poly but it’s too simple it would look like a cartoon.
Any advice about poly count? Is 1500 poly for a kitchen too much polygon already?

Thx ahead.

below image is about 700 poly with basic texture.

[Wilkes]

1500 is very low for an environment. Meshes can be tens of thousands of polygons depending on the detail you want. You have a lot of room to build before performance will start to drop.

[Alex18]

@Wilkes;360716

1500 is very low for an environment. Meshes can be tens of thousands of polygons depending on the detail you want. You have a lot of room to build before performance will start to drop.

Sweet, now I can add beveled rims, antique doors and all the fancy details.
Thx~

[scrcr0]

@Alex18;360760

Sweet, now I can add beveled rims, antique doors and all the fancy details.
Thx~

Bevels and stuff are often best handled in your normal maps, since you can bake a smoothed high-res mesh down onto your low-poly UVs and still get the same look with none of the mesh overheads.

That said, you have plenty of poly budget so may as well use it.

[Alex18]

@Crow87;360772

Bevels and stuff are often best handled in your normal maps, since you can bake a smoothed high-res mesh down onto your low-poly UVs and still get the same look with none of the mesh overheads.

That said, you have plenty of poly budget so may as well use it.

I’m trying to avoid baking hard surface things, I can lessen my work time greatly if I just don’t bake modern houses or buildings I guess.

[mariomguy]

The character model for Samus in Metroid Prime on the Gamecube was close to 10,000. The game ran 60 FPS. You have a vertex budget depending on your hardware: most hardware can handle somewhere in the realms of a few hundred thousand triangles for everything at 60 FPS, and you can go significantly more powerful from there. I do believe this is a “use it or lose it” budget because vertex operations are held separately from pixel operations. At least, I know this was the case a few years ago. I also believe Lost Planet had up to 600,000 polygons on the Xbox 360, which is far less powerful than anything that would be installed on a computer today. Integrated graphics installed on Intel’s i5 CPUs can beat that.

I would suggest putting bevels on sharp edges that matter, like the edges on top of the counter. I tried to bake a rounded bevel on a cube, and the result was always poor. Remember, the normal map is applied to the geometry, so if the geometry is far off the information the normal map is suggesting, the normal map will be erroneous and won’t be convincing. A simple bevel with smooth normals will fix all of that. No baking necessary.

To save on using too much of a polygon budget, see what you can do without. Maybe your sink doesn’t need a cylindrical faucet with 8 faces: 6 faces, or even 4 can yield a good result. I made a huge bridge for a project in college, and all the rails and everything only had 4-sides: when you smoothed the edges and added the reflection, since there was no normal map going over the geometry, the end result looked perfectly smooth, and I managed to build the bridge with less polygons than Mario’s character model in Super Mario 64. If this really is a showcase, though, then you might want that detail to show. Don’t be afraid to make something, computers nowadays can do pretty much anything.

[Elias79]

Well i was able run 56 million polygons with 15 fps on my 280x

[kraid]

The polycount of a model or a scene depends on many things, so 1500 polygons might be far to high under certain circumstances while it is not detailed enough in others.
Example: in an architecture visualisation you might spend the 1500 polygons on the water tap while in a mobile game the whole scene is made of only a few thousand polygons.

As for your Kitchen i’d say it’s very lowpoly by todays game standarts and certainly lacks a lot of detail if it’s meant to be for visualisation.

It even starts with your overall design of the scene.
The working plate shouldn’t be just a texture on the top, it should have a volume.
Maybe you should reconsider the black tiles all over the room, make things more distinctable.
Also your kitchen looks more like a bathroom to me.
Why not having actually cupboards under the plate?
You currently wasting a lot of storage space just for a working plate and a sink.

The sink should have a border as well, usually they are put into a hole in the plate from the top.

If you want to keep the faucet that way you should use different handles.
Right now you’re using two single handle ones next to a single faucet.
Rather use round handles for a double handle setup.

Get good references of faucets before starting to model one.

[Alex18]

@mariomguy;361429

The character model for Samus in Metroid Prime on the Gamecube was close to 10,000. The game ran 60 FPS. You have a vertex budget depending on your hardware: most hardware can handle somewhere in the realms of a few hundred thousand triangles for everything at 60 FPS, and you can go significantly more powerful from there. I do believe this is a “use it or lose it” budget because vertex operations are held separately from pixel operations. At least, I know this was the case a few years ago. I also believe Lost Planet had up to 600,000 polygons on the Xbox 360, which is far less powerful than anything that would be installed on a computer today. Integrated graphics installed on Intel’s i5 CPUs can beat that.

I would suggest putting bevels on sharp edges that matter, like the edges on top of the counter. I tried to bake a rounded bevel on a cube, and the result was always poor. Remember, the normal map is applied to the geometry, so if the geometry is far off the information the normal map is suggesting, the normal map will be erroneous and won’t be convincing. A simple bevel with smooth normals will fix all of that. No baking necessary.

To save on using too much of a polygon budget, see what you can do without. Maybe your sink doesn’t need a cylindrical faucet with 8 faces: 6 faces, or even 4 can yield a good result. I made a huge bridge for a project in college, and all the rails and everything only had 4-sides: when you smoothed the edges and added the reflection, since there was no normal map going over the geometry, the end result looked perfectly smooth, and I managed to build the bridge with less polygons than Mario’s character model in Super Mario 64. If this really is a showcase, though, then you might want that detail to show. Don’t be afraid to make something, computers nowadays can do pretty much anything.

That’s great, it seems there are a lot of room for the comparably high polygons.
I agree with you about beveled cubes, normal maps sometimes are not so efficient when it comes to hard surface, though it’s very useful with organic things.

uh, about cylinder… I used 12 faces… gotta try less polygons.

thx for the advice

[Alex18]

@kraid;361863

The polycount of a model or a scene depends on many things, so 1500 polygons might be far to high under certain circumstances while it is not detailed enough in others.
Example: in an architecture visualisation you might spend the 1500 polygons on the water tap while in a mobile game the whole scene is made of only a few thousand polygons.

As for your Kitchen i’d say it’s very lowpoly by todays game standarts and certainly lacks a lot of detail if it’s meant to be for visualisation.

It even starts with your overall design of the scene.
The working plate shouldn’t be just a texture on the top, it should have a volume.
Maybe you should reconsider the black tiles all over the room, make things more distinctable.
Also your kitchen looks more like a bathroom to me.
Why not having actually cupboards under the plate?
You currently wasting a lot of storage space just for a working plate and a sink.

The sink should have a border as well, usually they are put into a hole in the plate from the top.

If you want to keep the faucet that way you should use different handles.
Right now you’re using two single handle ones next to a single faucet.
Rather use round handles for a double handle setup.

Get good references of faucets before starting to model one.

No no, that image was just basic polygons to show you guys the concepts.
I’m still in the middle of making full kitchen, textures are not yet fully adjusted and still have to make more things,
I attached an image which I added more modeling and textures.

this is about 1200 poly so far. when I exclude sink(with faucet), it is 700 poly.

and I should add details on faucets, and make rims around things, make window frames, etc,…there are tons of things still should be done.
Yes the texture UV is weird, I have to re-adjust them after I nearly completed basic modelings.

[StephaBon]

My opinion: go crazy with polys. We are making iPhone applications that have 400,000 tris in the scene (not typically rendered all at once), with about 800 drawcalls in one frame, with a lot of materials, and we are consistently getting 45 fps on iPhone 5s (full resolution, AA quality set to 2). Polycount is not an issue anymore. We accidentally left a 90,000 tri prop in the scene and the fps did not move at all. Bevel everything in the geometry instead of adding countless normal maps to your memory usage, storage space, and creating texture fetches. It’s worth it.

[kraid]

I wouldn’t exactly say: go crazy, but don’t restrict yourself to much with poly limits.
You can always do Level of Detail for the models that have a very high polycount.

Also if you have the choice of either using edge bevels in geometry or have a higher
normalmap resolution to get the detail in, you’re usually better off with the first option.

One restriction: don’t create triangles that have a tiny width but an extreme length.

[Alex18]

@StephaBon;361946

My opinion: go crazy with polys. We are making iPhone applications that have 400,000 tris in the scene (not typically rendered all at once), with about 800 drawcalls in one frame, with a lot of materials, and we are consistently getting 45 fps on iPhone 5s (full resolution, AA quality set to 2). Polycount is not an issue anymore. We accidentally left a 90,000 tri prop in the scene and the fps did not move at all. Bevel everything in the geometry instead of adding countless normal maps to your memory usage, storage space, and creating texture fetches. It’s worth it.

I didn’t know iphone 5s could take that much, I still use iphone 4 and it stutters so much I just don’t play games on it.

when making models, I think I can make a small room under 10,000 poly with details, so nowadays’s technology is blessing.
People were talking about mobile game performance, so I was worried about overall polycount. Since everything is published to mobile nowadays.
But it seems I don’t need to worry about it that much.

Your advice helped a lot.

[Alex18]

@kraid;362481

One restriction: don’t create triangles that have a tiny width but an extreme length.

I think I know what you mean.

Reading all the replies, it seems that I don’t need to bake all the meshes. It’s great.

Thx~