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[wedgehead]

I'm about waist-deep in anim8or and I'm starting to wonder what I should expect from cre8or's game engine. I have a graphics card and all and can set most games at medium quality, sometimes higher, depending on the game. I can play Quake 4 with all the graphics settings at high.
I read somewhere, either here or in a tutorial, that I should try to stay below 2000 on the poly count for my models - I understood this to be an average figure. Is that the average for any one piece of a model, or the whole model? Say, a character, with moving limbs, etc?
(I have already downloaded cre8or and most of the tutorials.)
It would be a real drag to get all the way to the game making phase and find out my models are too complex, or far to inferior to what they could have been, understand?

P.S.  In case you need to know, I have a  Pent 4, 64 bit dual core chip, but its running 32 bit Vista. 1.5 Mb Ram, and a GT 7300 graphics card - it's a two year old e-machines. I've been using a flash drive as my virtual memory - that seems to have helped speed my system up a little, especially when I'm moving a lot of files around, but I can't say I noticed a diference when playing a high graphics game.

[huhftyuu]

Vista alone will give you problems.


I can't give you an idea of what 2000 polys is,
 I don't even know how to find out how many polys there are   <--- noob

[Dosser]

The real limit would be for the whole scene. And that limit would be dependent on hardware / efficiency of program.

However, the limit per scene might be hard to control: since the game might have hundreds of monsters on screen at once (depending on how the game works).

I'd say it depends on how 'important' the model is. For example: if the player's gun is going to take up the bottom of the screen, be in every scene, be close up, and take up large portions of the screen, obviously you can invest a fair few polys in it: possibly 1000-2000 would be a fair guide. An enemy's gun, which will be further away, smaller, less important and less visible anyway, might be less than 50 polygons. The monster himself might take 1500-3500 for a first person shooter, but in a top down role playing game he might be far less detailed: since more enemies are on screen at once, and they will be smaller anyway. A strategy game might aim for 50 or less polygons: where hundreds of grunts need to be seen.

So there is no hard and fast rule. It mainly depends on how many models you want on screen at once. If you want lots on screen: everything will have to be smaller to compensate, and each individual model doesn't need to look as detailed. For a beat-em-up game with only 2 models on screen, go nuts: even 10,000 polys each might be about right.

[wedgehead]

You select your model in editing mode and then and then go to Options, and then click on Info. It will tell you how many polygons, edges and faces your model has. It gives you an idea of how many lines, etc, the computer has to draw to make your model come out as a picture on the screen. If you're playing a game the computer has to constantly redraw your model while the game is being played. The game is basically a loop that plays over and over again, redrawing the scene many times each second, so it looks like objects, cars, characters, etc, are actually moving around. That is a lot of computations per second, and the more defined the models are, the more computations must be performed. If the program can't keep up with the numbers the game, or whatever program, will start to run slowly, and if it gets too out of whack it just "crashes" altogether.]
So, you want to try and make models that are low in polygons, etc, if you're going to be using it for games.

[wedgehead]

Wow! I just spilt my frigging tea! Uh, thanks - good answer. but what about cre8or? Do you have any experience with it?

[huhftyuu]

thanks for telling me that, wedgehead

[mcheccyb]

for cre8or help, i suggest going on the cre8or forums

www.cre8or3d.com/forum

[wedgehead]

Thanks - I forgot about that one; I've been to quite a few new sites since finding Anim8or. (I've learned quite a bit too. If I can get my job back I'll probably end up sending in a donation - The program is a lot better than most of them I checked out, and every one of those was overpriced. Maybe Obama can fix the economy!

[hihosilver]

Also, one thing you need to remember is that in games polys (polygons) are counted as tri's (triangles).  That means that when counting 2000 polys for a game, if your model is all quads, it will actually be 1000 quads.  So remember if you're counting the polys you need to triangulate the model first.  One way to do this is to export the object as a .3ds then import it and view the number of polys.

[wedgehead]

That's the best news I've heard all day! I mean I've been trying like crazy to get the count down. So that's a relief.  (I was wondering what people were talking about when they mentioned triangles and quads. I'm going to look back through the manual and the posts. Apperently it is another subject I need to spend some time on.
Oh! I finally got GIMP to work - after trying most of the day, on and off, to get Paint or some other program to edit my textures before applying them. GIMP looks sweet. It's too late to mess with it now, but I'm to put it through it's paces tomorrow.
If you're having trouble with GIMP check out their Forum - they have answers for just about anything. GIMP installed fine on my computer, but failed to run, and cited a file named libglib - 2.0 - 0.dll. The Forum Help said the file was, uh, "...curropt and probably left behind by..."; they suggested renaming the file - I just deleted it. It was dated 2007 - I just did a clean upgrade to Vista about five months ago. Go figure. Well, it's gone, now.

[Dosser]

Yeah, I'm using Gimp for textures too. After pirating an old version of photoshop for about 12 years (the same version of course), I don't think Gimp is anywhere near as powerful or simple to use, but I'm sick of pirating so will persevere.

If only people would charge reasonable rates for programs like photoshop

[wedgehead]

Well, I restarted my computer and no problems so far. That .dll file was probably from my old XP OS or something.(Old chunk of spyware probably.)