What is your poly budget?

Just call me Scout. · 2013-07-19T13:34:19

Being a 3D artist I am often asked to join others in there game projects, from years of experience I have learned to ask these three questions first. Have you made a 3D game before? Can I download it? What is your poly budget? In truth, I really only care about the third question, I will still join a project of a beginner if thy prove thy did some research. The answer: "modern game engines do not need poly budgets." means that the game, will not see the light of publication. Even a number, that I consider to be too high could mean the end of the conversation, but how much is too much? I fear that two years of working in the CGI world has numbed my understanding of the needs that game designers have. Now I am asking those of you who have worked or have a good understanding of 3D graphics, how much polygons do you use? I understand that it depends on the project so feel free to elaborate, if you want you can answer in a data form e.g. XNA 3rd Person Shooter. Hero 5000 Polygons(10 000 Tri) Edit: Bones 22 Enemy 4000 Polygons Edit: Bones 18 Large prop: Building 500 000 Poly Mid Prop: Tree 10 000 - 8 000 Poly (Static mesh) Small Prop: Gun 2500 Poly Ps: If we could use unlimited polygons, I will be one of the first to right a atom based game engine.

2D and 3D Art Visual Arts

Started by Scouting Ninja July 09, 2013 01:26 AM

11 comments, last by Tillman 10 years, 9 months ago

Outthink The Room

1,496

July 10, 2013 04:17 PM

But this isn't really the problem. The real problem is the one of finding appropriate level of detail. At 1080 resolution, you have 1310720 pixels, respectively 327680 4-pixel quads.

Doesn't 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels? I'm curious why you used basically half the pixels of that resolution.

I'm not a programmer by any means, so please excuse my ignorance. I'm just trying to understand your numbers in regards to pixel counts.

samoth

9,833

July 11, 2013 09:21 AM

But this isn't really the problem. The real problem is the one of finding appropriate level of detail. At 1080 resolution, you have 1310720 pixels, respectively 327680 4-pixel quads.

Doesn't 1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600 pixels? I'm curious why you used basically half the pixels of that resolution.

I'm not a programmer by any means, so please excuse my ignorance. I'm just trying to understand your numbers in regards to pixel counts.

Hehehe, that's because I'm stupid... I multiplied some wrong numbers. You're right, it's twice as many pixels (but still the same logical consequence, even if it is not as immediately obvious).

The one obvious thing is that if you have basically as many vertices (or even more!) as you have pixels at some point. The not so obvious thing is that long before you approach that limit, you already have considerable double-shading of border fragments.

Many people use triangles instead of full-screen quads nowadays to save double-shading the fragments on the diagonal when they do post-processing. Now imagine the same thing happening with a hundred thousand small triangles all over the scene. The more triangles you have, the more pixels necessarily happen to lie on some skew line, or on a border in general, covering only one or two pixels of the 2x2 group.

Scouting Ninja

4,573

Author

July 11, 2013 11:33 AM

Many people use triangles instead of full-screen quads nowadays to save double-shading the fragments on the diagonal when they do post-processing. Now imagine the same thing happening with a hundred thousand small triangles all over the scene. The more triangles you have, the more pixels necessarily happen to lie on some skew line, or on a border in general, covering only one or two pixels of the 2x2 group.

Is this avoidable?

If I can't avoid it can I solve it?

samoth

9,833

July 11, 2013 12:53 PM

Is this avoidable?
If I can't avoid it can I solve it?

You cannot avoid this from happening, but you can avoid it from impacting you. The way the hardware works will not change, so inevitably you will shade some fragments more than once. Up to some point, this does not matter.

Smaller triangles generally give a "better look", but with diminishing returns. At some point, even smaller triangles do not give any benefit any more, but theamount of doubly-shaded fragments figuratively explodes.

The solution is to draw everything at its proper level of detail, and for the artist this means to either generate a model that contains discrete levels of detail, or something that will gracefully downgrade with an on-the-fly LOD algorithm. Ideally, all triangles as seen on the screen are approximately the same size.

Your main character's or an enemy's model might very well have 25,000 triangles for the head only when you look straight into his eyes. These 25,000 triangles will cover 80-90% of the screen, so that is perfectly OK.

On the other hand, the same model (head plus body) viewed at a virtual distance of 50 meters will cover an area of the screen coparable to your thumbnail, so it probably shouldn't have more than a few dozen or at most a hundred triangles. If a thumbnail-sized area on the monitor corresponds to 25,000 triangles, you're shading every fragment a thousand times and you gain no visual quality at all (in fact, it may very well cause nasty aliasing artefacts). If half of your screen consists of thumb-sized areas of thousands of triangles, you're in serious trouble.