Polycount....

#1 Polygon count is a reative thing.

I know that's not the definitive answer you're looking for, but it's the truth.

To be more specific - the less characters and structures you have on a screen at any given time, the higher detail the meshes can be without sacrificing performance.

Conversely, the more objects you're going to put on screen at a time, the less detailed you'll want your meshes.

As for getting the level of detail in Torque that HL models have, sure, it could be done, but something, somewhere will suffer for it, unless you or someone on your team knows how to optimize for framerate and such.

You may want to look into TSE (Torque Shader Engine) as an alternative to TGE (Torque Game Engine) if you're really after the high end graphics. It supports newer technologies like normal mapping which can garner the detail of a high-poly mesh from a lower-poly counterpart.

I'd say, if you think you need 6K polys to make a detailed character, you could probably cut that in half by using a normal map and still maintian the quality of visual aesthetics you're looking for.

~ Hope this helps.

#2 Helps a lot.

Thanks.

I'm a programmer and I don't know anything about art...

I don't want to get TSE EA as of now because it is barely finished.

Thank you very much foryour help kriby!

#3 Blender polycount? anyone?

#4 Haven't dug in to blender yet, but anything that gives you a count on "faces" refers to polygons.

Also good to remember that, if your modelling app uses 'square' faces, they'll get divided on export so that each face is a triangle. The result is roughly double the number of faces.

You'd be surprised how many people don't know that and wonder why their beautiful '3K' model kills the framerate. =\

#5 @Patrick

Just an FYI but the models in Halflife 2 look the way they do not just because they have 2000 to 3000 polygon models for its characters (which is the norm for FPS games btw), but because they utilize Pixel Shaders to visually adjust what is rendered onto the screen to make the characters look more believable.

#6 Ahhh, it was the pixel shaders that does the amazing work in half life 2?


Wow. Because half life 2 graphics are....just....wow

#7 Hi well.....How many Polys can the engine handle smoothly on the screen. I am not looking for a exact number, but if I am trying to put together an FPS and I want it to run nice, when do polys start to become a problem.

To get to it, I am trying to figure out how to split my polys between my assets

#8 Half-Life 2 actually looks like it uses fairly high poly models and relies less on shaders than something like Doom 3 which uses pretty low polygon models but lots of bumpmapping.

#9 A huge part of it depends on your target hardware.

#10 The question is just too nebulous--there are so many other factors involved besides raw poly count to even establish a "total scene" benchmark for polys.

For example, how far away (or more directly regarding the TGE Level of Detail mechanism) are your models? Do you have finely granulated LoD's for your models?

What is the target platform specifications for your game?

What levels and types of client side processing are you doing other then simple rendering? are you spending time doing client side A* pathfinding for example (bad idea, but hypothetical here)?

What is your game's primary means of interaction? Are you looking at at most 3-7 of these high poly objects in a particular frame, surrounded within an indoor .dif environment? Are you talking about possibly seeing 1,000's of these high poly objects at once due to an army forming in an outdoor scene?

Folks have made some outstanding art with 1k polys. TGE can easily handle 2-5k poly models in certain configurations, and can handle many many more with excellent LoD planning.

And ultimately, if you are only focused on number of poly's as your criteria for how "good" your art is, there are an entire set of art production techniques that can give your models outstanding "art" with low to very low poly counts--look at World of Warcraft: those are some of the lowest poly models I've seen in a recent game!

#11 @Patrick

To answer your question. Yes Torque can do the type of models seen in HL2. At the end of the day all such models are simply meshes.

What tends to slow down and engine (this applies equally to Unreal 3 engine as it does to a home grown engine) is the processing applied to these meshes. Things such as texturing, lighting, shading etc all take a chunk of the available rendering time. The more sophisticated the effects applied to the models in a scene the more processing power and more powerful the graphics card will need to be, to display them.

Things like giving models levels of detail (where the number of polygons in a model drops based on how far away from the player the model is). Techniques like using bump and normal maps to simulate higher numbers of polygons that are actually there (used to great effect in HL2, Doom3 and the upcoming Unreal 3 engine) also cut down on the amount of processor power required.

Generally speaking, models should usually have between 2 - 4k polygons, though the normal maps can be made from models with millions of polygons worth of detail in them.

#12

Quote:
I'm getting my grip of Blender right now..seems like a VERY NICE program...have been using 3dMax and Maya but blender, in terms of the software speed as well as work flow, beats the expensive commercial ones..i'm impressed.

blink. blink.

one of those sentences i thought i'd never see.
well, that's awesome. maybe i'll go easier on blender in the future,
knowing it worked good for somebody. personally i find the interface too unfamiliar.

Anyhow.
I assume you found the polycount,
but in case you didn't it seems to be in the title bar of blender, on the right:
"Ve: 42-350 | Fa: 80-186 | Mem: 1.20M Tube"

Ve is vertices, Fa is faces,
the first number is the number added (in my quick test) by the previous operation, the second number is the total.

#13 I think it depends on what kind of game your doing. If you're doing an RPG you might want to highlight the environments more so then the characters. If you're doing a fighting game then more polys can be used on the characters. What kind of game are you thinking of making?