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

Its becouse they count the polygons in the non normal mapped character which they are going to extract normal maps from. Just taking a close look at KZ2 you see hard edges and not "that" high polygon count. And remember that Jak2 didnt use normal mapping for character, a technique to give impression that there is more geometry than it really is.

 

Faces are usually what has most polygons for better face expressials and upclose scenes. IF you seen models in 3Dsmax or editors in wirreframe you see how the face contains the highest concentration of geometry, especially for story/key related characters.

 

Here's the English version ; SOFTIMAGE|XSI Case Study : Metal Gear Solid 4 ...

 

saw that this morning, i wish more companies would do articles like that, even a more detailed post-mortem in regards to art (they tend to be design / programming focused usually)

 

Interesting...

 

Well, it seems my estimations were indeed wrong, although not in the way most people here believed. 5-10K polygons and 512*512 face textures - very impressive results on such tight resources.

 

5-10k polygons for models on MGS4?

 

Read the article on the Softimage website...

 

10K for Snake in MGS4?



You mean this?

Wow that's amazing

 

impressive, not impossible. you can still see some rather large polys there, that model looks between 8 - 10k, but without a solid silhouette its almost impossible to give an accurate number

 

You can definitely notice some peaks due to not as many polygons being used such as in the: arms, shoulders, legs, and thighs. It's really normal mapping that makes Snake look like a very impressive model.

 

30K





20~25K









5~10K ?!



Seems like all these numbers are pretty much meaningless

 

And that's also why it's meaningless for people to argue hardware power by comparing titles. Things are not always what they seem. The best developers can do more with less.

 

The problem you people don't see with MGS4 is that its art direction and style is very much "straight/hard edges". You don't notice bigger polygons as easily because the game has a very natural look to it, and the developers know this. Look at Vamps glove around the wrist - doesn't it look very edgy? Yes. But does it look out of place? No...because it fits in with the sharp style of the game.

 

I dont know if this has been touched yet, but how many polygons was the big guy from RE4 pushing. I cant think of his name it was something like el gauntey or something.

 

El Gigante or something

 

Well as we always say, its not all about the polygon counts but the advanced shaders, textures and lighting applied to models

 

Those are cutscene models you're looking at, which are likely much higher quality than the in-game model of Snake.

In fact, the poly count for each of those models might very well be higher than those of Uncharted.

 

Apparently the cutscene models are exactly the same as the models you play as/against.