Recommended poly count for player models and weapons

Development World Creation
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Always depends on the art and style of game for sure, for example a realistic fps game will need higher poly lods for a weapon than for cartoon fps. But if you stay within + or - 5k of last gen ranges you’ll be fine, and a large portion of people are still on older tech so for me i tend to even go lower than last gen poly values, but im sure ue4 can handle lots and lots of polys if you got the power.

Isn’t because since it’s a physically based rendering engine and each of those materials should have their own values for things like Fresnel, Diffusion, Reflection, Transparency, Translucency, Energy Conservation, ect ect so they look physically correct. I’d go as far as saying all different types of materials should have their own texture/materials, of course grouping them together like cloths, skins, metals isnt a bad thing, but all of the individual cloths skins and metals all have their own values too, just how far do you go down the rabbit hole ?

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Hi All. I found similar answers when first starting Unity 1.5yrs ago. Coming from NWN1 (very low poly) and 2 (2k ish ?) I wanted to know what was considered Next Gen.

Through serious testing and clues from topics like …testing with 1, 10, 25, 50, and 100 Characters Dancing (all randomly) without chugging.
Environment was a wooded ‘Druid’ setting with and without scripted occlusion (M2H Culling). Dynamic lighting and weather (Unistorm) is turned on. So plenty of trees with a slight wind to shuffle them around.

PC is an Asus ROG i7 16GB RAM 7200RPM HDD nVidia GTX660M <= Nice PC but lower on the High End rigs.

Nude Biped: 32-37k Tris (Tested with Mixamo Fuse, and Genesis)
Alpha Hair: 15k Tris
Draw Calls were 6 (Mixamo Fuse) and 10 ( Genesis…had to do quite a bit of group combining of like textures in Blender to get the draw calls optimized)

Added via Code a randomly changing set of clothing outfits (torso, legs, feet) during the above testing. 0=Nude, 1=10k, 2=15k, 3=25k, 4=50k, 5=75k

  • Mixamo Fuse characters come with clothing and very well optimized…totaling still 25k tries with 2k textures and normal maps. They look great. Still at 6 Draw Calls. Issue is…cannot simply swap clothing. So they stayed at 25k Nude for the testing.
    During the testing at 50 characters with the 50k clothing outfits was where the results seemed to be the best visually at 100 characters. At 25 characters and 75k clothing things ran flawlessly. Even at 50 characters at 75k clothing it was not bad at all but the PC was really working hard.

I can state without a doubt that a newish PC with a nice graphics card (Passmark of 1500+ ://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html) will nab you with a 100k budget per character without even denting the computer. You could up that budget to 200k if you limit the character counts to 50.

The Single Largest influence during testing was turning M2H Culling ON (basically makes the ‘hidden’ polys not render at all from the camera’s perpective). The result would be the same in multiplayer as well since each camera has it’s own culling happening. There is an enormous performance hit when turning a nice occlusion system OFF. In my opinion much less needs to be done in LOD work with a proper occlusion system functioning. very much surprised me. I was very pleased since I really only needed 2 LOD levels and that was going to be specifically directed at vegetation.

Having great normal maps and detailed textures really helps with the Hi-Rez feel. Nice thing is it costs the GPU nothing to render since it it painting the entire texture in 1 draw call per texture. If you have a nice atlasing system you can essentially combine all the separate textures into one in game atlas for…1 draw call for the everything on the character. Generate a new atlas at every clothing outfit switch.
**I do not know if UE4 can do texture atlas optimization.

Lastly, and definitely worth stating again, shaders have a huge impact on the GPUs. They come in all sorts of flavors as we all know. These must be tendered carefully or they will destroy your visual budgets.

So a very solid opinion for Next Gen is roughly 50k to 200k budget per character.
My design basis…100k per character @ 100 characters on display at one time in a multiplayer environment with tight control on the style of VFX and shaders. has a great ‘feel’ to it.

Happy Designing!

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I wonder why the numbers go as high as 50-100k nowadays, when tessellation and displacement are included and ready to be used, and LOD partially becomes a matter of limiting the tessellation factors.

I’m still using UDK but when I move to UE4 I’ll try to change and refine my art pipeline/workflow in an attempt to accomplish much faster art production times (I will deviate a little from the mainstream art specs of nowadays)
my intention will be to target 25k polys for a paperdolled character (including all body parts plus hair and a set of clothes). from there ‘upwards’ I want to make use of tessellation and displacement, and of course ‘downwards’ use the standard LOD mesh replacements. I’m confident that it will be enough. is for a third person game with a realistic art style and multiplayer in mind by the way.
we’ll see how it goes in some months :slight_smile:

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I’ve adopted a philosophy about sort of thing (detail vs performance). I figure that any project I work on will take quite a while before anybody else is going to be playing it. Over that stretch of time the average performance capability of most computers will have increased noticeably. So I always target the higher end of the scale, pushing whatever system I’m using at the time to a framerate a little below what I’d like. By the time its done it will be a better fit to current systems at that time.
See I tend to play a lot of older PC games, and I always seem to end up playing them with all the settings maxed out, wishing that the developers had pushed the envelope a little further.

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It very much sounds to me like your talking about polycounts post-tessellation, which is reasonable when looking at subject from engine programming perspective, but on the modeling side I do suspect that 20-30k sounds more reasonable, smaller files are also faster to load in, I’d wager a guess but indeed as some have mentioned it really comes down to how much detail you need to create just to be able to define the silhouette and to rig & animate that thing. Also remember that some of the detail/silhouette comes from normal maps and displacement applied on top of tessellation( last bit of geometry created by the engine/gpu @ run-time)!

Ha-ha, yeah, I do know what you mean. And you definitely have a point, you indeed should always consider the time it takes to actually develop the game and how the HW standards change during that time, but it can also be rather hard to determine how long exactly it will take standard average might well be ~3 years per game but for a variety of reasons it can easyly turn into 5 just as well, yeah.

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So, I do have a question,
I just finished up an NPC model which will be used as a baddie, he came to 14.5K polys. (I believe that and am hoping that is acceptable for URE4 as I would hate to have to retopologize by hand all over again.)
I do see the term "tris"used around in the thread and from my research on , I hear that you want to avoid using tris as much as possible as it has major distortion on lighting and textures when animated.
They are okay to be used on objects that either will not be animated, or if they are in areas not normally seen by the player.
The more important thing that was hit on repeatedly in my research was 2 points to increase performance:

  1. that the model use as minimal tris as possible and
  2. it have as little seams as possible when creating the UV map.

oddly enough when I exported my model from Zbrush to StudioMax it automatically converted it to all tris which netted a poly count of 9K, I scraped it and re-exported the mesh as quads because of what I was reading online. However seeing that people are using the terminology “tries” on the number of polys I’m hoping that I haven’t created a bunch of additional work for myself. Can anyone offer any clarification on ? Thanks much in advance.

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When modeling (especially sub division modeling) you normally want to avoid tris, generally because it’s easier to work with quads and add edge loops, etc. When it comes to actually making a game ready mesh, it’s going to be converted into tris by the game engine, so it doesn’t matter if you triangulate the mesh or if the engine does it, it’s going to happen. You do want to triangulate a mesh before baking a normal map (because it normal map generation). Number of UV seams isn’t a huge, generally less is better, but you don’t have to try to be super optimal with the number of seams. And for characters it’s even less of an because you don’t have to worry about light map generation.

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Thanks ZacD,

That makes more sense now, Saves me from having to completely remap my low poly in quads :slight_smile:

Just to be clear if I am baking with say XNormal, High poly model is okay to be in quads, low poly model os okay in tris as it will result in a good bake.

And should the model be animated before it’s converted in to tris or does that even really matter?
Sorry for all the newb questions.
I’m confident in my skill to model a good looking design but when it comes to the technical stuff, it’s my first time doing all these conversions into a proper game mesh.
There are so many contradictory statements out there on the web :slight_smile:

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Yup for xnormal. Normally meshes are rigged as quads, and then sometimes tris are put in to help control skinning.

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1600 for Low Poly items like swords for mobile maximum is what i been told
and up to 25,000 Polys for Characters / Cars …
etc PC games Xbox games etc.

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You resurrected an old post, also not true and highly dependent, those numbers used be the average 15 years ago.

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i got told last year from an epic staff member as would be ok for all models thru email.

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It’s a highly subjective number and depends entirely on how you set up the scene / what you are doing.

If you were making a cinematic only scene you could get away with triple the amounts. If you are pre-rendering even 8 times as much.

If you need it for mobile you might go even lower than half… hard to gauge really. Also because it depends on what else is on the scene and the poly count of that…

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There’s plenty of current gen console games with 40k-80k characters and 100k cars.

https://polycount/discussion/141061/polycounts-in-next-gen-games-thread