Ok so I am working on a game project and it’s inside of a mansion and i’m planning on having a ton of details in each room, like way more than the average game. I want everything to look awesome. Since unreal only draws what it sees I am quite confident that I can have this extreme detail without any problems, i mean i’m not going to go overboard, but I think about 5-8 million poly’s per room give or take. Each room is designed so you cant look out of one room and see into another, so this will make it so you cant see more poly’s than we plan, and the hallways wont have anywhere near that detail, so can I do this with no problems or what?
Check out using Blender for more realism. I watched a tutorial on that and the texture looked pretty good.
I’ll see if I can find it for you op.
Otherwise you could create your own textures by just grabing some sort of top view of polished wood/marble etc and make some photoshop and in engine adjustments to it, should work?
Here it is, it should get you started I hope.
The average poly count for a detailed model of a game character probably lies somewhere between 20-30k (maybe a little more now since PS4 and Xbox One are out), and you want to create a level that consists of multiple rooms each having 5-8 million polys a piece… If you create assets that use that many polys in a single room, what purpose would these objects serve? Are you doing a showcase to show off the looks of the mansion, or making a functional game that involves the mansion?
How much detail you could go with depends on what kind of game you are making and the amount of optimization used.
5-8 million for a Unreal Tournament FPS game would be a bit much but for a point and click game should not be a problem at all and for the most part it’s not the total amount of polygons being used that could be a potential problem but the number of draw calls being preformed with in the visible view port.
Something to consider for rooms with a lot of small detail items is to use a texture atlas instead of a lot of smaller material types as well as procedural and instanced items. You could for example make an entire book shelf with hundreds of books using a single texture atlas and a single book object. Could even do the same for pictures as well.
More important over and about how much detail you can put into an environment is to plan a bit ahead of time of how to get as much detail into the works using common elements in the same manner as in building as real world room. A 2x4 is a 2x4.
Something else to consider is using progressive loading of the rooms and since there will be hallways you could switch them in and out on the fly so the total memory foot print would only be limited to the room your in and the only real limitation is the amount of available hard drive storage and with proper planing you could go 10 times as much if you wish.
Well since unreal only draws what it sees, and when you leave the room you cant see into any other rooms does it really matter how many polys are in one room at a time? I think I over estimated how many polys there will be. Or will this method cause mempory problems?
What is “Progressive loading” ?? and how would I use it in UE4?
Have you already made a room with 5-8 million polys of detail?
Because if you haven’t, I wouldn’t suggest setting a limit. Rather you should create your level/room based off the look you want to achieve. Then look at your performance costs.
Even if you have 4 million poly’s in one room it will cause problems when it is combined with lighting, materials and textures. You wouldnt want to create lightmap UV’s for high poly models because it will take too much of your time so you’ll have to use dynamic lighting, and a single light source wont be enough for interior so those add on when poly count gets higher. And even though the rooms are separate, the player will see more than 50% of the room as they enter. Exteriors can cope with even higher poly counts since viewed area would be more limited(comparing to the fov when you enter a room) and you would make use of LOD’s for distant objects.
I have actually gotten 16 million poly’s on screen at once with no problem, I actually could have done more than that, and that’s on a gaming laptop, so 5-8 million poly’s shouldn’t be a problem. I kept adding until I had like 40 million, by then it was lagging, then i went behind a wall and it stopped. So naturally I would think that 5-8 million poly’s would be fine for each room, and that’s taking lighting, objects, world assets, weapons, characters and enemies into consideration. I say 5-8 million poly’s but it more than likely won’t be higher than 1 million per room, if that. But I said 5-8 because I like to over compensate a little bit to see where the limits are, that way I know what i have to work with.
So what should i do any suggestions?
My advice make a low poly of each model and render out normal maps, Ambient Occlusion, etc.
This will improve performance dramatically and allow lower end PCs and Hardware to run your game. 
Here is a free tool to help with that
ok thanks, one of my modelers has already made a lot of high poly stuff, is there a program like simplygon that i can use to make them low poly? I dont want to make her have to model all that stuff all over again.
EDIT: oh and preferably free.
You’d be suprised what you can get away with on modern consoles and PC’s with decent OC, not like I’d go out of my way to make everything as high poly as possible (everything within reason and all that). Dynamic lights / shadows and shader complexity generally causes the most headaches, general workflow for modelling is to make a high poly version then remesh / export a low poly version and then let your normal maps add weight and detail. Also there are types of displacement shaders that help out…
I told my modeller to keep everything under 10,000 poly’s and there will be maybe 5 or 6 dynamic lights if that in the entire game. Is it ok if we just use the models exactly like she has them now?