I am kinda new to game development and I have a pretty straight forward question. I try get a feeling for what is considered low poly, medium poly and high poly count on 3rd person player characters on modern games. I read those terms but have no clue what poly counts are considered either.
Does anyone know the poly counts for 3rd person player characters of current games and games of the last few years.
Lets say for example: Lara Croft (Shadow of the Tomb Raider), Gerald (Witcher 3), Characters in Dragon Age Inquisition, main characters in Assassins Creed Odyssey.
I think the size of your texture maps used in your materials affects more the performance than your poly count. For example, I was using a 70k tris poly character (third person shooter, over-shoulder-camera) and it was pretty intense because I had 10 material slots linked to my pawn, with many texture maps over 1024X1024 (most in 2048X2048). When I sized down the texture maps, the laggy is gone. You can always check the performance using FPS Stat and UNIT stat and see what’s happening to your model. Graphics Analyzer like Microsoft’s comes in handy. My suggestion is to pay more attention to your texture sizes than poly tris.
Those games you mentioned have around 70 to 120k tris.
Thank you for your reply. I just try to get a feeling about poly count by looking at character models, that is why I asked for the specific models. Just by my gut feeling, from the mentioned examples above I would think that Lara Croft has the most.
The actual polycount does not matter as much as to how much is being rendered per frame and how many draw calls are taking place as relative to the camera so the count in polygons is not as important as to what those polygons inherent that has a performance hit and the over use of complex shaders can have a higher impact on a 100k model. Every thing else depends on design.
For example we have reserved LOD O as the high fidelity layer for menu load outs and completely dressed up player models with hair can be upwards to 200k as performance is not a concern. For real time game play, and now that there is auto LOD for static as well as skeletal objects, both the mesh and applied materials can be LODed as either a set value, based on screen percentage, or dynamically based on total render load per frame.
Our rule of thumb now that optimization can be made in UE4 is all assets needs to be at max fidelity as once in UE4 you can make something less if it’s to much rather than trying to make not enough do more. Think of assets imported into UE4 in the same way as making a high quality video. If you start with low res assets you will never get the quality output your looking for
I forgot to mention, hair cards add a lot of tris usually Characters look really nice when they have 50k to 100k tris (hair and props included), but it’s pretty hard to create a good skinning and rigging for characters with that high poly count.
As FrankieV said, LOD makes difference depending on your game genre. For example, mine is a third person shooter over the shoulder (camera closer to the character and doesn’t change the distance), so I have only one LOD level for my player pawn. If you game genre is adventure or any other the camera distance changes, well, LOD is very important for you.
WilliamK is right. You can download the models and run some tests. Some websites like Free3D have some rigged models to download: https://free3d.com/3d-models/games
Mod communities is a great option as well.
Characters look really nice when they have 50k to 100k tris (hair and props included), but it’s pretty hard to create a good skinning and rigging for characters with that high poly count.