"Yes, but how many polygons?" An artist blog entry with interesting numbers

Unfortunately it doesn't work like that in real life.

 

Considering how buff those gears of wars characters are, an extremely form-fitting outfit(beyond killzone.), where you have a buff human body basically visible in all its glory, should take more polygons than cylindrical armor. The abs, buttocks, thighs, etc. You can't tell me some armor whose detail is easily given by normal maps requires as many polygons as a fit muscle builder's body.

gears model without textures

tekken 6 abs

Now imagine the thighs, legs, buttocks, back and everything else looking round, organic and well defined.

Or are you saying it doesn't matter? Armor can even be blocky if one wants, while a form fitting outfit can't get away with such things. Thus I believe there is a tendency, even if slight, to need more polygons for form-fitting outfits on fit muscular men.

 

That is not a Gears of War ingame model.
That is a model that's been used for the Unreal Engine 3 presentation, back when it was revealed, sometime in 2003 or so. The actual ingame Locust character is quite different looking, having been reworked a few times; and it has more polygons as well.
And this is not the Marcus Fenix character anyway.

What does a Tekken character got to do with either Gears or KZ2? It's irrelevant to this discussion.

Polygon counts are defined by one and only one thing: what the programmers set as upper limits for the artists. If the budget is 50K, the artist has more freedom; if it's 10K, he'll be more conservative. That's all there is to it.

Edit: just so you know, I've been working professionaly as a 3D character modeler for the past 8 years... I'm talking from actual experience here.

 

By the way, the exact number is 11255 triangles for Marcus, without weapons or anything - just loaded up the model that's available for download on the UE3 mod site.
But he has no teeth, so it may indeed not be the model used in the cinematics

 

That's a character design issue. El Blaze is a speed character, not a power character, so that makes sense. Try a power character, like Akira for something like that.

 

Hmm I thought we were discussing about the relation of visible polygon edges and the number of polygons characters are made of, which still on topic.

Basically 40k poly characters can still have visible edges during closeup (waist/chest high), especially if they have elaborate hairs and many objects attached to them. And the one that suffer are shoulders, arms, hand and fingers.

Polygons are not always evenly distributed, its in the hand of the artist. Remember at the early stages MGS4 Snake was said to have like 60k vertices or something high just for the hair alone. It was later reduced by one significant figure, if I am not wrong.

Real time characters that's pretty smooth at close up are those ones from tech demo from NVIDIA and ATI. Like that NV fairy Dawn for example is very smooth looking even during closeup. If I recall correctly Dawn is made up of about 150k poly and that don't include her hair.

So I don't know why (beside budget) for realtime closeup cinematic they don't used 300k poly models, I am sure the GPU can handle them.

 

Snakes beard alone is meant to contain as many polygons/as much detail as a enemy in MGS3. So unless the PS2 was pushing multiple 60k characters on screen, I'd say you got your numbers confused.

 

No v3 is right, it was 60000 vertices for hair and 6000 vertices for the moustache. Of course they have massively reduced this number for both mustache and hair as is evident in the later screenshots of Snake (more like a lesser amount of sprites bent on the head).

 

Maybe becouse of collition detection and how such high numbers for a model also means drastically increase in overall polygon count when it cast volumetric shadow(s)?

 

Those tech demo models are usually built from subdivision surfaces, a type of HOS. The trouble is that they can't be tesselated on the GPU so they're relying on the CPU to do this for every frame. It's OK to doso, unless you're trying to run a game at the same time...

 

Can they not use the tessellator hardware on Xenos or R600

 

That tesselator doesn't support Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces as far as I know.
SPEs might be OK for this but they have a lot else to do, and tesselated mesh data takes a LOT of space. You have to include all the UV coordinates, vertex colors etc. and usually you want to tesselate after skinning, so it has to be done on the CPU as well.
And of course it has to be repeated for each shadow casting lightsource when using shadow buffers.

 

I couldn't find an untextured fenix, so that's what I used.

My point is that it would likely require more polygons for a muscled character with form-fitting clothing to be properly represented than for an armored one, as it would more easily give off the presence of a low polygon count.

My point was regarding that character showing insufficient polygons in several areas despite not being that buffed. Other characters can be more buffed without diluting the point.

 

You can't make such assumptions. In my experience, hard surfaces like armor can easily take up a lot more polygons, even in low-res.
Modeling out the individual muscles on a character isn't neccessary anyway, as normal mapping can get you wonderful results, and you don't need too much detail in the silhouettes. Armor on the other hand can become very complex, particularly circular details.

So in short: poly count depends on far too many factors to make any statements about it.

 

I wish the ratio of artist to programmers was more balanced here at B3D.

Great information Laa-Yosh!

 

It's pretty evident that you're just trying to make up arguments to support a preconception...

 

We've noticed that for a while Laa-Yosh, we were just curious at how long you were going to keep patiently playing along.

Thanks for keeping the info straight LY, but I think you're arguing with a brick wall at this point.

 

Honestly, KZ2 is probably using a bit more polygons per character then Gears, but it has absolutely nothing to do with the content... and it absolutely does not have any effect on how the two games look.

 

For cinematic closeup, you don't need collision detection. If shadow is a problem, it can be pre calculated what ever you need for cut-scenes and stored on disc.

 

Ahh I see, I thought you meant for use ingame and cut-scene.