is there a recommendation for a comfortable poly count for player and weapon models that will be used in a multiplayer game? I love detail, but I also love good frame rates.
I asked the same question not long ago,I was recommended to use around 30k for characters. Looking at weapons around the internet, I’ve seen many say that weapons in last gen games used around 10k, so that should be a safe number. Anyone feel free to correct me if I’m wrong.
the answer is “depends” it’s been said before and will again but it all depends on your game eg amount of characters weapons vehicles on screen .
now if you have 100 characters on screen then i doubt them being 30k would be a good idea but if your only going to have say 5 then why not push a little higher. it all depends on what hardware you want to target and when.
atm the rule i use is to look at what Epic show in the demo games and go with that
I would say it’s always good to stay as low as possible, because sometimes people model details which wont be seen in the game. 
But as geodav said, it always depends on the game (e.g I’m currently developing an open world game and we use characters with around 18.000 tris
In terms of how many polys to go with, I think you’ll probably know its too much when your PC gets as slow as a snail
Honestly, just go with what you need. Try and keep it low. More details in characters/weapons the player will see up close and lower for things like world models and such (if its a FPS game).
If its third person… well you can basically do lower poly (no too low) models for everything. The player would have a hard time making out details when the camera is so zoomed out.
And remember if you ever need, you can bake out normal maps for extra detail.
Hope helps,
~ Jason
I was planning to do a typical 30 player game. 15K +/- for player models sounds decent, especially with LOD. I haven’t done player models in some time. I remember when modeling for Quake 2 that 4000 was considered too high. 
It all depends on your game and so many other factors to consider polycount in scene, how many materials/draw calls, animations playing and the list goes on etc… To be honest 30k is really heavy for a game unless it is a single player with one guy on the screen. there is no doubt new engine can render large amounts of triangles as i have one scene over 1 million tris “not broken down or properly set up yet just imported to run though as a flow map test”
If the artist knows what he is doing and utilizes a high poly to low poly work flow you could easily stay at 10k tris, without noticing any difference. Now with that being said, it still can depend on the character factors if its humanoid and going for realistic hair utilizing image planes, or its a huge creature with tentacles it will have to have a larger count. Standard humanoid no hair planes can easily land under 10k. Best practice is to go as low as possible without losing quality of the art. Why use more resources you may need later if you don’t have too?
30k is much ?
Ryse characters have about 150k polygons.
Polygon count is the least thing you should consider when you trying to optimize performance for PC game. Days when GPU could be choked by to many triangles are long gone.
It is far more likely that you have to complex lighting, shader setup or to many object to render (please not objects not triangles!) and your CPU can’t keep up with sending enough data to process.
If it was me, I would target characters of coop multiplayer game (8 player character) to about 100k tris, with lots of moving parts, cloth sim, and procedural animations.
100k is for entire character. Including attached weapons, attached decorations, simulated clothing etc.
For enemies. It entirely depends on scale. Big dragon will obviously have more than 200k tris, even if only to boost texture densnity trough vertex painting.
I would be sticking to 15-20K for LOD0 down to about 5K for LOD3 or 4 I would never got to 100 or 200K - the skinning would be a nightmare 
From my own experience 30k is more then we care to use when creating art “unless specified by the client.” Everyone has their own opinion and work flows but Why would you use 30k if you can manage to do it at 10k with no difference in quality? That’s all i was saying, go as low as possible. Also i hardly doubt new developers, indie developers have the same knowledge or resources to learn how to render characters that run at 150k at 60 frames, or a stable frame rate for that matter. Your 8 characters @ 100k the engine probably can handle but it seems like a waste of resources that might come back to haunt you down the road.
You are right, although I don’t say that all character should have 100k polygons no matter what. It’s more realistic maximum amount of triangles which can be per single character.
Besides that with lots of movable attachments (like weapons, sachets, etc.) it can quickly, go up.
For your main character, feel free to up the polycount to a higher level, within reason (if it’s a 3rd person or “true fps” game where you see the character up close all the time), but for the rest, try to keep them lower as mentioned above around 20-40k (lower the better) for the actual game, and then for cut-scenes or close-ups you could create an LOD for the character with a higher count, gives you the best of both worlds.
But it really depends on how close the other characters are going to be to your camera.
Guys, what would be a solid Triangle budget for a Third Person weapon (single player) for the Xbone/PS4/PC platforms? With roughly 8 players on screen, .
I’ve heard people say on the Polycount forums that x2 current gen is completely acceptable for FPS, but does that apply for Third Person props as well? For ref, Gears of War 3 dedicated approx. 1,800-6,500 tri’s to its weapons.
Here is the Uncharted 4 trailer, which has a pretty high-res handgun: ?v=y1Rx-Bbht5E
Thanks!
There really isn’t a solid tri count. is still answer that will be “Depends” as mentioned above. It all depends on the performance you’re targeting.
If you look at the ShooterGame example the weapons in there are around the 15K+ tri count. ShooterGame has been tested and runs on the PS4/Xbox One as well, if you wanted to use as a reference.
For Third Person props I would take into account LODs for the weapons. If the camera is never going to get close enough to see the detail of a 15K model when you get achieve the same with 7-10k why add the extra detail that will never be seen?
As for the trailer you linked looks all pre-rendered and not gameplay. may not be the best example.
The best option would be to get your HP model completed and when you get to the point where you start play testing use variations of different quality and see what works best for you.
The characters in ‘Half-Life 2’ were well under 10K (I think they’re mostly around 5K actually) and still look fine as far as I’m concerned. Newer games have waaaaaaaaaay more. I stick to the low side myself (10K and under) because I’m lazy. My guns are around 2K. LOL But most of my characters are either robots or wearing loose/realistic clothing (as opposed to tight bodysuits).
Let me ask another question in thread rather than making another one,since seems relevant to the topic .
How many materials per “main character” is considered ideal ?
I recall i seen the same question on UDK forums some years ago , and the answer was 2-3 materials per character seems ideal .
But i see the character in the content example ( the mettalic guy with brown coat ) has 8 materials and 2 cloth assets , i was like wow , since i was struggling to make my character with only 2 materials .
One material per main character.
It’s better to have one material with 30,000 triangles than to have ten materials with 2,000 triangles each, even though the number of triangles is higher in the first case.
Btw: In my opinion, you can make perfectly good-looking third-person or first-person characters with 10,000-15,000 triangles and one high-resolution material, if you take care with the ambient occlusion and normal map generation. And there are lots of PC-s out there with crappy graphics still – Intel GMA 950 on Windows XP is still something like 10% of the game-playing public. If you’re an indie, will likely matter. If you’re a signed AAA studio with sponsorship by NVIDIA and next-generation console releases, then that probably doesn’t matter as much as finding just the right shade of brown to scream “next gen!” in the cinematic trailer 
For multi material setups, try to keep it under control, as you get one draw call per material, so extensive use of multi-material nodes is not recommended. However when used in moderation, they can add extra detail, so if you need to, by all means go for it. I usually use workflow for my vehicles, but it can be for anything, but you should keep it to objects the player will see close up on screen. doing it everywhere will cause performance issues.
Note that there is a of number of material slots for a single object is 64, so long as you keep in the lower range and use it sparingly, there is not reason to not give it a try.
, everything you said makes sense. Why add detail that is not going to be seen in the end, right?. I guess just testing out Props with varying Tri counts will answer my question. I was also thinking of having a very high-res LOD0, but aggressively lower the other LOD’s, a method used in Crysis 3.
I linked the Uncharted 4 trailer because ND did something similar with their premier U3 trailer. The weapon in the U3 trailer was the same version that is used for gameplay. Here are some wires:
But it could also be their engine and it’s ability to push more polygons than most.
****: Thanks for the info!
i think i’ve read somewhere on forum that you should seperate your cloth material from the rest , and people like to put face and sometimes hands in a seperate material than the rest of the body for obvious reasons , these alone would make 3 materials , i’m not sure how 1 would be ideal .