Anim8or Community
General Category => General Anim8or Forum => Topic started by: rellik420 on December 06, 2008, 12:06:59 am
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this almost has something to do with anim8or, and it looks like quite a few of u guys use anim8or in games.
my question is, whats the standards in poly's in games. im talking about how many in models, particles, and enviroments. if any1 has any knowledge of this please add to it. thanks for ur help.
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There is a very broad range here. Honestly there is no set value.
It can depend on a lot of things. First, what kind of computers are you aiming at? What game engine are you running on? Characters on high-end computers using the crysis game engine can handle 10,000 polys for characters whereas older computers running a basic engine use something more like 2,000-4,000.
But then again, that can change a lot depending on the game type. Will the characters be close to the camera a lot? If so you'll want more polys. If not, you want less so you can use more in other places and speed up the game.
Also, how many characters/objects/effects are on the screen at a time? That can change things a ton as well.
As you can already tell, it's all relative and there's no simple answer.
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"it looks like quite a few of u guys use anim8or in games."
I am using it for games.
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The surest way to find out what works for you is to create random shapes with various polygon counts and simple animations, load them into a test program, and then see at which p-count your framerate starts getting too choppy. This also happens to be a good way to practice getting everything together if you're just starting. You'll also want to experiment in the same way with the quality of your texture maps. Just don't forget that it really helps to streamline your programming so that, as hihosilver says, you use higher quality models when something is close to the camera than when it is in the distance - this means building different quality versions of all your models that will be significantly changing their distance to the viewer.
Even now my personal preference is to keep the poly count low (1,500 per object max) as it speeds build times, my friends aren't too picky, and it lets me put more objects on screen at once. However, I am by no means an expert on the subject.
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The lower amount of polies the better, surprisingly a well textured low poly model can look alot better than a poor textured high poly model. I probably wouldn't want to pass 2000 polies for 1 character, unless it was really necessary. As long as its fun, it doesn't have to be AAA quality.