What constitutes low polygons?
Blitz3D Forums/Blitz3D Programming/What constitutes low polygons?
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| Im curious what is meant by low polygon modeling, my fps has taken a huge hit just by adding a few gates. I know have a total of 20 doors/gates and fps can drop to 28ish depending on where player is looking. Suggestions would be helpful.:) |
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| Low is just that, a low polygon count. How are you creating the gates? Using CopyEntity() is best as I believe the newly copied entitys are instances of the original, they use/share the same mesh & texture data. Note that if you deform an entity, any copies of it will deform also. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Tom |
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| thanks tom, but im new to 3d and especially new to creating my own stuff. low as in 100, 1000, or 50000 per entity? |
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| Doesn't the surface count of an entity also play a major role where render speed is concerned? |
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| Well, the count has grown over the years as GFX hardware gets faster. Someone asked a similar question on another forum, http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2155 , to which the infamous BoBo the Seal replied: The average right now for PC is 1000 (NPC's and lower end engines) to 5000 (boss characters and higher end engines) The key is the number of characters on screen at a given time, the effects that will be on the character, and the detail of the world geometry. If it's 2 or 3 characters you might be able to get away with 2000 poly models on a good engine with dynamic LOD (level of detail). If it's more characters at a time, for instance a town, the polycount should be as low as possible. In most boss battles it's just you and the boss in a room together. You can push the polycount up in this case. Consols have a bit more freedom at this time. There polycounts can be a bit higher do to the fact that the developer doesn't have to make sure the game works on multiple systems. You have a specific spec and again depending on your engine and your LOD you can create characters as high as possible within the seen before it begins effecting performance. This is also why you see more games on the consol that support bump mapping and light maps and in the case of the xbox, Geforce 3 specific functionality. If you are creating assets for a demo real I think it’s helpful to do multiple characters under specific guidelines and state that in your portfolio. Here is an example of some of the task I am given to work from on a PC title: (note, I’m also usually given a description and/or a concept to work from) 500-700 polies for a base creature that you might fight multiple of at a given time. 1000 polies for a basic NPC 1500 polies for a humanoid enemy if it’s silhouette warrants that high a count. 2000 for key characters 2500 for the hero 3000 - 3500 for sub boss 3500 – 4500 for boss’s if it’s silhouette warrant that high a count. Oh and just because you have a certain number of polies to use doesn't always means it's best to use them. The lower you can get within your budget, without affecting the quality of the model, the better. The engineer model I did was 1350 polies. For Blitz3D you'd probably want to aim a little lower. Tom |
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| thanks Tom, great reply |
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| simply put: low polygon is when the model has lots of nasty sharp edges (like a quake model or somthing) then mid-poly is that smoothed. high-poly is for films and needs pre-rendered, unless u happen to have the latest supercomputer which performs 1 trillion calculations per second. :) |
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| thx all for replies. seems i have a problem. gets any worse and it wont be fps, but spf (seconds per frame):) |
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| Nicoust, if it's any help as a benchmark, I've had 10 animated characters in the same scene plus houses and terrain, about 30,000 tris in all. A touch slow on my desktop machine, but smooth and sweet on my (last year's) laptop - so it's very much up to the performance/memory/video of the individual machine. The only thing to watch out for if you are new to 3D is if you are using doors dowloaded from the internet which were modelled for high detail? This is what I did when I first started, and soon learned that one high poly model can bring the system to it's knees - that the best way (doors or people) is to buy/borrow/steal/model your own, low-poly, but nicely textured. |
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| hi Nicoust, since u say ur new to 3d then don't worry to much, it is a long road. :/ here is something u may not know: vertex normals affect the way light diffuses across polygons, if the normals are "smoothed" (or normalized) then they can make the model look less angular and more concave. the trick with game-dev is to use as little polys as possible to create the shape you want, smoothing can help a lot here. flat shaded polygons are not normalised, so you see all the polys, but smoothing softens the edges, so to get smoothed edges you need to have angles under about 75dg so that smoothing will "iron out the creases". hope that was some help. |
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| THX Something, Been using my own, the doors were amazingly low polly, a cube (flattened) with a nice wood grain texture. I added some iron bar gates (nice rust texture) started taking a hit, however it was something to do with the way camera pick was working with the mouse key hit. Sorted now, but was a useful learning exercise. Had blitz3d about 4 years, gave up previously due to time restraints plus a couple of other issues, more time now, so hoping to get to grips with it. Been using blitz+ to get familiar with general blitz again. I do have another question(surprisingly). I use Cartography Shop 4.1. When building a wall at times it isnt posible to use one object to form the wall, when there are 2 objects next to each other, even when positioned exactly - light and shadow effects them differently, any suggestions for this, or trial and error? |
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| Boned animations always can take a chunk of your fps too, so beware of that too. |
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