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I have one or two questions I would like to ask.
1. Firstly, what is the poly count for character models in lets say current gen, like HL2 and Doom3 and next gen, like Gears of War and Hellgate London.
2. Secondly, I was doing a tutorial before which was for max 8 and I use max 9 and in 8 you have a utility for counting poly’s but in 9 it is the viewport by pressing 7, now even though my model was close to the one in the tutorial, I had a poly count half that of the one done in 8. So is this a broken tool, if yes is there another tool I can use?
Thanks for the assistance.
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I’m not sure on the first one, up to 10,000 for the main characters would seem acceptable to me, but I’m not sure of that, a lot of detail on models nowadays is gotten through normal maps, which don’t add extra polies.
As for the 2nd one, is your model triangulated? Polygons don’t have to be triangles, in your case it sounds like 3DS Max 8 is using triangles, and you’re using quads, which means you’d use half the amount of polies.
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ya that would make sense, I use quads, but the tutorial also seemed to use quads, looked that way anyway. And what about the current gen of games is it 5000 poly’s as in quads or tri’s? And when you say 10000 poly’s, do you mean quads or tri’s? And is there another program I can use to count my poly’s just to be sure?
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Apparently the Spider-man model for Spider-man 3 has 50,000 polys. I’m not an artists, but that definitely seems overkill to me.
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Well 30,000 poly’s sounds like alot but it still didnt look that good, same as the last movies id say. Using something like zbrush to add extreme detail to some complicated character, 30,000 poly’s wouldnt seem like that much then but for what the character was id say it might have been too much. But I am no professional so I cant really say.
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Polygon counter is a utility in max.
It is under the tab that has the hammer at the top (utilities tab).
under utilities click "More" then choose polygon counter.
Choose triangles rather then quads to get an accurate count.Personally I call it a tricount just to be specific.
If you use editable poly you will get the polycount, but use editable mesh and you get the tricount. Editable poly is a more developed toolset though.
50,000 sounds very small to me for a film character to be honest.
Those guys arent worrying about real time rendering. -
No, I was talking about the game!
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oh… apologies satchmo.. my mistake
That is a very big amount for an ingame model. I would have thought 3000 – 5000 was more the level its at nowadays.
Polygon counts for games seem to be somewhat unclear nowadays.
There is a habit of quoting the polycount of the hi-poly model used for normal map generation. -
Seems I miss read it sorry.
As for polycount tool as I wrote before I use max 9 which doesnt have that tool but instead has the ability for it to show poly’s and verts in the viewport by pressing 7. I dont know how accurate this is so I was asking is there a third person app that I can use.
But no one has answered the other question first, in modern games is it 5,000 / 3,000 poly’s that is the body count and is that tri’s or quads. And what is the count for next gen, 10,000? And again is that quads or tris. Cheers for the reply’s lads.
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@Subedei:
Im a max 8 user and I would be surprised if polygon counter was removed.
Are you sure you have clicked "more" on the utilities Tab?The face count you talk of by pressing 7 is also in max 8 and most previous versions as far as I remember.
Both tools should be in your max version.
I can either hit 7 in a viewport or use polygon counter in the utilities tab, but with polygon counter I can specify tri’s or quads.But on the offchance they have actually removed the polygon counter utility just add an edit mesh modifier on the top of your modifier stack and hit 7 when you have it selected. As said before editable mesh basically specify’s triangles rather then polygons.
As for the polycount I personally assume it means triangles rather then polygons as its the triangles that generally decide the load on the engine.
As for todays polygon levels in games today, well thats a very open ended question. The hi poly model used for normal map generation may have a ridiculous polycount but the actual base model the normal map is applied to is generally way smaller. But at the end of the day a normal map is just a fancy texture. I quoted 3000-5000 but thats just an approximation, it really depends on what kind of game your making and what assets will be on screen at any one time. -
I would have said the poly count of current / last gen (PS2) was about 2,000 tris. Next gen is about 10,000. (Dependent on the game and engine obviously)
And the count is in triangles, not polys. Triangles is your SI unit of meaurement in games :) -
Cheers lads, thanks for the reply’s. I heard that games like Doom 3 and Half Life 2 had around 5,000 tri’s. Maybe I an wrong. SI unit?
And to Barry Gallagher, I am not that new, I have been using max for over 2 years now, and I do know how to press the more button under the utilities tab. But I am afraid it is not available in max 9, the polygon counter is not where it used to be, I dont know why they did this but they did. Never thought about using the edit mesh modifier but it looks like the only solution I can use unless there is a third party piece of software somewhere.
One more question, is there somewhere you can go to find out the poly tri count for a game or do you just look and take an approximate guess how many poly’s in that game. Cheers again for the help.
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I’ve be suprised if they had 5,000 tris on a current gen console version, more probably to have that on a PC version, although if there weren’t many characters on screen at once, you could probably get away with it.
Best way to find the tri count of characters in a game is to ask someone who’s worked on a game ;)
Doubt you’ll find that info anywhere else, unless you can import characters into games and find some of those characters to load into maya/max. Think you could do with with some FPS and WoW ? -
You are right I was talking about the PC versions of these games, not the console version as I am PC gamer not a console gamer, uuh drawing lines here. I am asking as I plan to bring my current model into Doom 3.
As for asking someone who worked on the game, I am afraid I don’t anyone in the industry so I am afraid that it is beyond me to find out. I don’t know if you can load characters from Doom into max, ill have to see. I know that Blizzard uses max for its games but WoW isn’t built to be modified by the community so I don’t think that is an option.
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Found this on a different forum.
"The new Stats display is considered a replacement of the old (scripted)
counter.
Since AFAIK the old one was a script, chances are you could just locate it
in Max 8 and copy it into 9 without a problem, then reassign the 7 key to
the MacroScript instead of the new Stats." -
Okay I am good at max but I have never touched its scripting abilities at all, Im more of a user, so I would have no idea where even to begin doing that.
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You dont need to know how to script to use a script!
A big amount of buttons you press in max could be considered script. Did you have to know how to script to use them?
Its literally a case of dragging and dropping the right file into the right folder so you can once again find the polygon counter in the utilities tab. You dont need to know a thing about scripting.
At a glance in my max 8 dir’s I would say Macro_PolyCounter.mcr is the script for it for obvious reasons. There may be some UI files to go with that. Im not sure.
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I have one or two questions I would like to ask.
1. Firstly, what is the poly count for character models in lets say current gen, like HL2 and Doom3 and next gen, like Gears of War and Hellgate London.
[/quote:fb4c8d1843]Depends on the game engine. Gears of War generally had a tri count of just under 11,000polys for the grunt type characters. Marcus Fenix’s model had about 15,000 tris at it’s highest LOD. HL2 had up to 12,000 polys for the main characters, although this may have increased after Episode One was released. The characters in Doom 3 were generally between about 1,200 and 5,000 polys.
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wow, that is perfect, thanks alot. Didnt know that HL2 had 12,000 poly’s in some of its characters, that is nice. And it used Normal mapping ontop of that really impressive. Alot of space to work with there. How did you find out about the poly count by the way?
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I was at a session at GDC 2004 where the Valve art team demoed their tools and XSI, using in-game models, before HL2 was released. I also have "making of" books of Doom 3 and a character modelling book that uses some character models from GOW in it
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ah, I tried to buy the Doom 3 book but was unable to get it. The other book most d’artiste Char modeling 2 ya? Was thinking of drifting that one myself, looks worth the cash
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To be honest there are only about 10 pages of the GOW stuff in Character Modelling 2, the rest I could take it or leave it, but there is some beautiful art in there. You can also buy accompaniying books for Halo (with bits of Halo 2) and Half-Life (Raising the Bar)
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I have d’artiste character modelling 1, reading at the moment. I have and read Half Life 2 raising the bar, nice book, a bit thin on info though. I definitely think Character Modelling 2 will be my next drift. Though I am not a fan of Halo so i think I will give that one a skip, can’t mod it either long as I know, Doom 3 and HL2 are the games I’m aiming at in order to enter the modding community and GOW because of the next-gen ness of it. Cheers for the reply’s lads.
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