!?! 9750 polys in 3ds max BUT 26,768 in UE!?!

[Oblivion2500]

I made a low poly model for a weapon for UT3. It said 9750 polys in 3ds max, but when I imported it into Unreal Editor for UT3, it said about 26,000 polys. WHY!?! Please help me.

P.S.
I looked at the redeemer and Avril weapon mesh, it said "12,000" polys. So 9000 is ok.

[Xendance]

UDK measures things with triangles (because a polygon can mean a triangle, quad, pentagon, hexagon etc...). So one polygon is at least two triangles.
That is because all geometry is rendered by using triangles (all games do that).

[flyinrooster]

Polygons and triangles aren't the same thing. If in max you had a lot of n-gons on your model and you didn't look to see how many triangles it had, only polygons, then yes it's possible that your poly count went up when you imported your mesh into udk because udk does not use polygons, it uses triangles (meaning it converted your mesh to triangles, thus the higher "poly" count).

[Hitpawz]

In max, right click the "+" at the top left of your viewport and choose "Configure". Highlight the "statistics" tab and tell it to display triangles instead of polygons. Hit ok and press "7" on your keyboard. Don't even bother displaying polygons because it's meaningless for games.

[Deliverance6]

for a a quick and hacky fix in 3dsMax, you can convert the whole mesh to an Editable Poly. select all vertecies and hit "Weld" then knock it to around 0.2 and weld the lot. generally works alright on weapon meshes, not so much for characters and should knock the tri-count down drastically

[Oblivion2500]

Ok. I fixed it. I had to reduce the Tri and poly count for my model.

[MythSoldier]

then what's are good triangle count for a character model, because all I head 18000 polygons max for characters?

[Hyper_Shado]

then what's are good triangle count for a character model, because all I head 18000 polygons max for characters?

IIRC the maximum amount of triangles (not just any polys, but TRIANGLES) is 30,000. The UDK models have about 20,000 triangles at the maximum Level of Detail.

[Chosker]

another easy fix in max is to convert to editable mesh, go into sub-object -> edge, select all edges, and make them visible (bottom of everything, 'visible' button). that'll make all be triangles.
anyway, trust the number of triangles, not the number of polygons. and trust the number that UDK tells you, not your 3d modelling package. it's UDK what will be rendering those polygons, if it thinks it has 26,000 then it will render 26,000.

all in all, 26k poly's for a weapon is excessive, as is 12k or 9k.
my game has as much as 10k for a character model including hair, clothes and armor. AFAIK nowadays games with good detail go from 10k to 20k. using more isn't really needed (that's what normalmaps are for).
for weapons I'd say 2k max for it to be reasonable.

again, all of this in triangles, not polygons