Polycount

[McMonkeyBoy]

Hi there guys! I'm curious to find out what sizes and guides we should follow here for model / overall level polycounts? Does anyone know or did I just ask a really stupid question?

Cheers guys 'n' gals.

[Tom Havlik]

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=40563

Should explain it quite well. Good luck, and Merry Christmas :)

[darthviper107]

Like developing for PC there are a lot of things that have to be taken into consideration

Like you might be able to have higher polycounts if you have less textures or smaller textures

Also, it depends on how much you can see at once. Testing the Citadel level, they actually do quite good--things have around 300-2,000 poly count and some pretty large textures, although I'm guessing the textures get reduced in size for the platform.

I think the main thing would be the characters--maybe half what they are on PC.

[Piranhi]

Character meshes should be as low poly as possible Infinity Blade characters are around 8k poly 3k verts.

Not sure what the polygon count should be for full scene rendering though.

[McMonkeyBoy]

Wow brilliant, thank you for that link Tom.

We actually get quite a bit of room to play with the iPhone, alot more than I thought. Going to start planning my project after Xmas.

Merry Christmas to you guys.

[Tom Havlik]

Like developing for PC there are a lot of things that have to be taken into consideration

Like you might be able to have higher polycounts if you have less textures or smaller textures

Also, it depends on how much you can see at once. Testing the Citadel level, they actually do quite good--things have around 300-2,000 poly count and some pretty large textures, although I'm guessing the textures get reduced in size for the platform.

I think the main thing would be the characters--maybe half what they are on PC.

I somewhat disagree with a part of this. If the shading algorithm stays the same, uploading more textures to the GPU (if there is one) would have virtually no effect on the CPU's performance. This is the irony of video cards being sold on newegg and whatnot; you can get a 1gb video card for $20 that rocks at everything texture memory-related, but fails completely at any kind of shader.

Now, I'm only partly disagreeing because less textures translates loosely into less batches, which affects nothing but the CPU :) However, unless you're using an unreasonable amount of different textures in the same frame, this shouldn't be the case. Smaller textures would make no difference here.

The iPhone 3GS on that thread for Polycount says it has 24mb of texture memory. I think if you stayed below 21mb for your whole scene, you're good to go (256x256 textures will appear much higher detail on a smaller screen!)

Happy coding :D