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

sebbbi said:
For our last three games we have been using (texture coordinate shift) parallax mapping on all our surfaces, as it's basically free and looks better than normal mapping.
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Some reference material would be nice! Can you provide some screenshots that show parallax mapping in use on characters along with poly counts?
 
Yeah, as it's kinda hard to imagine how this can help jagged silhouettes... Why render any polygons then at all?
 
Laa-Yosh said:
Yeah, as it's kinda hard to imagine how this can help jagged silhouettes... Why render any polygons then at all?
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The most used parallax mapping technique (texture coordinate shift according to one height sampling result) does not improve the silhoutte quality at all. But it makes the polygon surfaces themselves look much more 3-dimensional than normal mapping does (but is not perfect by any means). This is the technology most current games use. Newer (and much more expensive) pixel based displacement mapping techniques (relief mapping, multilayered relief mapping, cone stepping relief mapping, parallax occlusion mapping, steep parallax mapping, interval mapping, etc, etc) do affect object silhouettes, and produce much more realistic 3d effect (pixel perfect displacement). There has been a lot of research in this field lately, and the pixel based displacement mapping techniques get faster and faster all the time.

Even with advanced pixel based displacement mapping techniques (both heightfield based and arbitrary 3d), it's usually advantageous to render low polygon models opposed to bounding boxes of the objects. This both reduces fill rate and makes the ray traversal faster (the polygon surface is more near the final collision point). Also by rendering approximate polygon surface of the object, you utilize the polygon based hardware better, and get benefits from the z-buffering, hierarchial-z culling and the texture lod calculation hardware components (major speed up on complex scenes).

Currently I think the most useful parallax mapping technique is this one. In addition to the height map sample, it takes account the surface normal vector to better calculate the parallax shift. The extra performance cost is only a few percents compared to the basic parallax mapping in synthetic scenarios (in real game scenarios less than one percent):
http://www.cescg.org/CESCG-2006/papers/TUBudapest-Premecz-Matyas.pdf
 
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I wasn't sure where to place this question. Where do you think the polygon counts for characters will be at if next gen launches in 2&1/2 years? 100k+ for fighting game and 50k+ for others? Obviously, this is a very open ended question but I am very curious. Esp if the next gen has graphics cards more powerful than a gtx295 or 4870x2. Does anyone have polygon counts for the upcoming tekken 6, the newly released sf4 and soul calibur 4?
 
so, does anyone know how many polygons ghost busters is?

did the developers slip up in the past or are there any pictures of their work on maya or 3d studio max?

my same question also applies to gears2 and uncharted as well.
 
Gears 2 should have nearly the same as gears 1 in terms of polygon for characters.
Drake in UC has approx 30k & the supporting characters are approx 25k with the enemies being 15k & I remember Crystal Dynamics once said that Lara in TR:Underworld has near about 33k for her default outfit. [Donno if it was true]

Anywyas This thread would be more appropriate for Poly discussion. [Its been dead for a while]
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43975
 
COPS N RAPPERS said:
hmmmmmm, you know looking at gears of war 2's models for the guns they look pretty intricate.

http://xbox360.ign.com/dor/objects/...f-war-2-20081103060310561.html?page=mediaFull

http://screenshots.teamxbox.com/screen-hires/89483/Gears-of-War-2/

I'm not sure if gears1 and gears 2 are perfectly identical....maybe some of the face and character models are but the weapons look smoother.
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The increase from the graphics is because of better lightning and such, so they did not need to change the polycount to achieve this goal. In the end, both look great, imo :)
 
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yea I saw that article a while ago, a nice use of poly budget & some good art can make it look much much better.

Btw does anyone has an estimate over the polys for the guns in KZ2 ? [I know its quite odd to guess something like poly directly :)]
 
Don't want to derail the thread... but i did notice from the date on the very first post that today is the 2 year anniversary of this thread... thought it was worth a mention anyways :p

Very interesting to hear the poly counts of the more popular games of this gen though ;)
 
el_rika said:
Snake is actually 14.000 polys. I'll see if i can find the article.

Here it is: http://game.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/20081203/3dmg4.htm (use google translate)

cheers.
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thanks, i read all of it, it sounded to weird to be true........but i guess it's true.:smile:

wow, that's one hell of a poker face konami had.....MGS4 won best graphics of 08.

I say, if konami can make a 14,000 polygon model look like 20 to 25k all running within a 1024x768 frame, then i say they are the kings of illusion.;)

MGS4 was one of my favorite games.:smile:

Any word on DMC4, i hear somewhere in the thread it was 17k.
 
COPS N RAPPERS said:
thanks, i read all of it, it sounded to weird to be true........but i guess it's true.:smile:

wow, that's one hell of a poker face konami had..... MGS4 won best graphics of 08.

I say, if konami can make a 14,000 polygon model look like 20 to 25k all running within a 1024x768 frame, then i say they are the kings of illusion.;)

MGS4 was one of my favorite games.:smile:

Any word on DMC4, i hear somewhere in the thread it was 17k.
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Artistically maybe but technically ehm :???:
 
Graphics aren't always about performance and whatnot... I'd go as far and say the graphics of Shadow of the Colossus etc. on PS2 look miles better than some games on either PS3 or 360, although they aren't better stats wise, but they just look better.
 
assurdum said:
Artistically maybe but technically ehm :???:
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like i said........poker face.:smile:

i however did notice there was something up with the model of snake, his shoulders and arms looked funny whenever he would holed a gun.;)

http://ps3.ign.com/dor/objects/7140...triots--20080612044115030.html?page=mediaFull

I'm guessing the majority of the polygons went mostly into the character's faces and fingers. (to advert the assumption of the idea that no progress was made in facial and finger grip expressions)

i think that's what konami is known for in their models cause i saw those exact unique differences when i would compare models of other ps2 games to MGS2 and 3. (other games would have just the same amount of polygons but balanced throughout the model regardless of having crappy or stale looking faces.)

so does that mean gears2 has more polygons?

gears2 is still one of my favorite both online and offline games of all times.;)
 
TheWretched said:
Graphics aren't always about performance and whatnot... I'd go as far and say the graphics of Shadow of the Colossus etc. on PS2 look miles better than some games on either PS3 or 360, although they aren't better stats wise, but they just look better.
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Pure artistry is always important. My favorite example of this, is Far Cry 2 in comparison to Crysis/Crysis Warhead. Some of the textures in Crysis were a bit lower resolution (just barely) than the max settings in Far Cry 2, but Crysis still looked better thanks to Crytek's shader implementations and just better overall artistry. My favorite example being the ground textures themselves. Far Cry 2 feels really cheaply built sometimes, while Crysis feels like there was some care in rendering the environment properly instead of taking a directly copied leaf texture and pasting it. Far Cry 2 also uses lame ass rotating sprites for the grass too! Lets not get into old game art vs new game art either. I miss fully hand created game art instead of all this computerized BS, but I guess it's cheaper/easier to do.
 
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