6 replies to this topic

[servadm]

Assume we are creating characters for a MMO game like Guild Wars / DAOC / etc...

1) What do you think the poly count would be for these models, so far the only real number i've seen is 4500 polys from in a book from 2004(for the original model, then tweaked later during testing, adjusted for LOS/Distance/Visibility/etc...)

2) Are they all still created from polygons by hand? i'm familiar with the process, but I didn't know if there were any plugins or external programs to do a lot of the setup work (like, create human, bird, animal) then go edit from there

Thanks.

[Reedbeta]

servadm said:

1) What do you think the poly count would be for these models?

This depends on the engine you're using and your target system reqs. Basically, you need to figure out how many triangles you can render with that engine on a computer with the minimum reqs and still maintain an acceptable framerate. That's your triangle budget. Subtract out the number of triangles you want to devote to the landscape and world, divide by the maximum number of characters visible at a time, and you get your budget for an individual character. Of course this isn't an exact science and you'll often end up tweaking the numbers as you go along.

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2) Are they all still created from polygons by hand? i'm familiar with the process, but I didn't know if there were any plugins or external programs to do a lot of the setup work (like, create human, bird, animal) then go edit from there.

I'm not an artist, but I bet that artists leverage previous work as much as possible, just like programmers. I'd imagine that there are databases of generic models of people, animals, objects that you can get access to and use as starting points for creating your own models. Some of them are even free and you can get them online.

[servadm]

Reedbeta said:

This depends on the engine you're using and your target system reqs. Basically, you need to figure out how many triangles you can render with that engine on a computer with the minimum reqs and still maintain an acceptable framerate. That's your triangle budget. Subtract out the number of triangles you want to devote to the landscape and world, divide by the maximum number of characters visible at a time, and you get your budget for an individual character. Of course this isn't an exact science and you'll often end up tweaking the numbers as you go along.

Thanks for the reply,

To preface, this came about because I saw poser listed as useful for games, then i realized it wasn't really for my purposes, since their default character is 63,000 polys. Then I realized i have no idea if my own assumptions are right to begin with.

I was just seeing if there were any general responses like:

- No commercial model would have that few, it would look amatuerish, try 15-20k

- The count is still way too high for a MMO character, you won't be able to do any battles, try 2k

- Could be right, try it and see.

If it's the latter than I can at least start there and see how it goes, but I just wanted to know if i was in the playing field.

[TheNut]

Poser is good for 2D art like animated sprites, but I wouldn't use their format to render skeletal animation, it's very inefficient.

1) Models are always in the hundreds of thousands of polygons. In this day and age, artists create normal maps from the high resolution model. They can then polymorph the model down to something more reasonable. Depending on how well the normal map system works, they can reduce the model down to only a couple hundred polygons.

2) Normally they model it from the ground up. Experienced artists will just plot a set of points, extrude the content, and morph the subject until they get their desired look and feel. Others will take several photographs of the subject and trace it in some 3D software.

[spacerat]

Also if you're going to use a LOD-system, you can get some more details for the characters. If I remeber right, already Quake3 had such LOD for characters.

[Almos]

This little program might come in handy when creating normal maps for your models. The only limitation here is that both the low-poly working model and the high-poly reference must be in triangles instead of quads... And, of course, don't forget to uv-map the low-poly model prior to rendering the normal map!

[dega512]

Quote

To preface, this came about because I saw poser listed as useful for games, then i realized it wasn't really for my purposes, since their default character is 63,000 polys. Then I realized i have no idea if my own assumptions are right to begin with.
I was just seeing if there were any general responses like:
- No commercial model would have that few, it would look amatuerish, try 15-20k
- The count is still way too high for a MMO character, you won't be able to do any battles, try 2k

Well, you might try using a high-poly modeler to make your model (or I suppose you could download your base model somewhere and alter it) - then go to something like Blender and run the poly reducer script (probably more than once), it does a pretty good job at maintaining the detail of the original mesh and getting a decent poly count.

I hope this helps somehow.
- dega