What is recommended polycount for a character these days?
I’m talking about PC platform, not mobiles. I’m interested in 3rd person “camera behind shoulder” perspective and “zoomable rts” perspective.
I think polycount is not the only magic number here. It also depends how expensive your materials are and how many element slots, (translates to drawcalls) you have.
Also “PC” as platform leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Do you aim for “Titan Z required” or “GeForce 210 supported” ?
But in general, I wouldnt go above 100k tris, or 130k for a real detailed one with a lot of cloth and armor…
The reason why I asked is because my polycount-related habits might be a bit outdated - 10k tris looks like a high number to me, yet here you are speaking of 100k polys per character.
As for materials… you’re looking at standard unreal 4 surface shader, at least 4 textures per material (base color + normal + some of the occlusion/emissive/specular/metallic maps), most likely at least 2k texture resolution, most likely up to 3 or 4 different materials per character, about dozen immediately visible chars in scene with 3rd person perspective, and about 50 of them in scene with rts perspective.
For a character, its surely on the low end, unless you go for a cartoon/stylized look.
The scenario you describe, I would make several LOD versions of the mesh. For the close-up ones, I would go for 80k to 100k (also depending from your standard camera distance)
The farther away they are, the more simpler they can be. Right down to 5k to 10k for the real distant ones.
Afterall, it should be unlikely that 50 of them are close to the camera at once…
It always depends on the game and how many characters you will have in your scene. e.g for my open world game I use a character with around 11k tris (looks pretty good for such a low tri count) 
Alright, thanks for the responses, I think I have better idea about polycounts now. Question answered.
personally for most games I would say 25-60K tris is good for almost any game aimed at pc, I mean sure modern GPU’s can handle characters with say 100K tris fairly easily but usually you just don’t need that much.
This isn’t necessarily a one size fits all answer. I generally shoot for resolutions on the lower end, anywhere from 5k - 25k polygons for characters. If it’s a hero character (player) maybe more if they are third person.
One of the things that will dictate how far you can go is how many characters are on screen at one time. I once was creating a zombie game with each zombie taking up 25k polygons , and when hordes of zombies are on screen it just slowed to a crawl.
There are good ways of minimizing geometry, and keeping detail through normal maps (projecting detail in Zbrush is incredibly valuable).
Make different resolutions. 5k, 10k, 25k see what you can get away with as you decimate it down in programs like Zbrush and still maintain integrity. See how high you can go in game without impacting game play.
The current 3rd person template is 45K with reasonable materials so that would make it your bench mark target. More or less though as much as you want and our teams current player model budget is 200k for hi res rending art and visuals like player set up menus where performance is not an issue.
The nice thing about UE4 is you can hotrod your model assets, test drive them, and make optimization decisions on the fly.
polycount processing CPU not GPU ( omg)