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

[Lucid_Dreamer]

And having as reference a 70K/80k model and then seeing the part of U2 Drake mesh. Looking at the difference I believe they are talking about multipass numbers.

Do we know if devs use multipass numbers when referencing character polygon counts this generation? If so, how often (list of these games)? Personally, I can't recall any.

Also, it would seem we would have to assume that Uncharted 1 character polygon counts were multipass as well, if we follow your theory (otherwise, it wouldn't make much sense to use two different methods for counting character polygons between sequels).

 

[Neb]

Do we know if devs use multipass numbers when referencing character polygon counts this generation? If so, how often (list of these games)? Personally, I can't recall any.

Lost Planet, possibly RE5 IIRC. I am certain there are several more but most devs dont really want to tell you that as hype value dips to 0.

Also, it would seem we would have to assume that Uncharted 1 character polygon counts were multipass as well, if we follow your theory (otherwise, it wouldn't make much sense to use two different methods for counting character polygons between sequels).

You cant assume they both have same shading. U2 might need to do multipass due to the shaders it use. Whilst U1 didn't becouse it didn't use these shaders. Who knows, the better character shading in pre-rendered cutscenes might be the cause...

Another thing to note is the true number vs multipass number released to public (hype/marketing vs documents for devs). For first Uncharted game they said the true polygon mesh numbers and provided a wireframe. IMO U2 mesh bit dont clash together with 80K polygon claim unless multipass.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Most Assassin's Creed 2 characters seem to be 6000 triangles, re-using the same head geometry:
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?t=77667

 

[ultragpu]

Ezio's model looked really good for 6000tris ingame, others looked average though. Well they all looked nice from a distance but only in close ups can you start counting the polygons in their hands and all. I always thought Altair had at least 10k polys.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

That Ezio model has almost no armor and equipment on him, once you get those the poly count seems to double...
I could also check the version of Ezio that we've been sent last year, although that wasn't final and had no weapons and just the basic armor. But Ubi might not like me posting that stuff so I'll consider it...

 

[Lucid_Dreamer]

For first Uncharted game they said the true polygon mesh numbers and provided a wireframe. IMO U2 mesh bit dont clash together with 80K polygon claim unless multipass.

Further back in time, I remember similar doubts about Uncharted 1 character polygon count. It seems like the 30K number was accurate for Uncharted 1. I don't know whether your guess about Uncharted 2 is true or not. I'm just noticing similarities from the past in these present assessments.

 

[Neb]

I dont think there was much doubt with Uncharted Drake numbers as "Diamant" (ND dev) did reveal an amount of 25-30k polygons for Drake model early on in this forum!

 

[assurdum]

I dont think there was much doubt with Uncharted Drake numbers as "Diamant" (ND dev) did reveal an amount of 25-30k polygons for Drake model early on in this forum!

I never understand why do you persist to said no way of 80k poly of nate when you haven't nothing to prove the opposite... I mean probably in some or more scenes use multipass etc. but what change? GT 5 will use 400k for a single car at 1080p, & probably here depends of the situations but again so? However or you have a real source about that or the nd specify continue to be the only base we have.

 

[Neb]

I never understand why do you persist to said no way of 80k poly of nate when you haven't nothing to prove the opposite...

I just dont think that number is for single pass based on the wireframe pics of U2, U1 and reference. If you want to ignore those images then OK but then there is no point in replying to you about this anymore then.

I mean probably in some or more scenes use multipass etc. but what change?

Well for starters the mesh model would not be 80K. There are several games doing multipass for models but the interesting value is the mesh models polygon amount.

Here is an example of multipass numbers and mesh numbers.
http://img96.imageshack.us/img96/2049/wireframew.jpg

However or you have a real source about that or the nd specify continue to be the only base we have.

You have part of the U2 Drake body mesh in wireframe mode in a image linked previously (seems to even be from cutscene).

GT 5 will use 400k for a single car at 1080p, & probably here depends of the situations but again so?

You mean car selection menu/photomode vs ingame with "depends of the situations"? But that probably is the mesh polygon amount and then you have the LODs. Much like Forza 3 has cars meshes of upwards 1000k polygons but ingame much less?

 

[COPS N RAPPERS]

there isn't much info to work with about UC2's polygons, other than a pic that shows a peace of Nathan's mesh with a number 30,000 typed next to it, which was pretty descriptive.

but anyways, what makes this 80k seem pretty odd is that they literally skipped 40, 50, and 60k. (for which case all three of these numbers are big as it is and still never were used in any 3rd person shooter or adventure game, and with 40k being very much a dream for a lot of games.)

the only console game that hit 40k was i believe virtua fighter 5 and possibly fight night round 4, for which these games had a reason for it. these games already were using separate models for clothing, wrinkles and physics were not baked into the model the clothing was given a bone structure and specific cloth attributes, attributes that were overlaid on the character model.

In Uc2's situation there isn't much geometry complexity in the characters to require 80,000 polygons, these characters don't have specific cloth attributes, and they don't lug around complex gear to require such a number of polygons either. since the characters don't exactly have any of that the polygons would just end up piling next to each other, forming a very dense wireframe mesh. (which is not what that one mesh of Uc2's nathan was depicting)

 

[proffesso]

GT 5 will use 400k for a single car at 1080p, & probably here depends of the situations but again so? However or you have a real source about that or the nd specify continue to be the only base we have.

400k...combined from all passes or purely mesh alone?

400k mesh is 10x what a current gen car game is using for a base mesh. and more than twice what GT P uses.

source?

 

[Alucardx23]

400k...combined from all passes or purely mesh alone?

400k mesh is 10x what a current gen car game is using for a base mesh. and more than twice what GT P uses.

source?

He must be talking about the cars models in the selection screen.

What is a major difference in the detail level of the cars from GT4?
There are 400,000 polygons per car, 100 times more than were present on GT4. GT4 had 4,000 polygons per car. You can customize and tune the cars, too.

http://www.autoweek.com/article/20091103/SEMA/911039983#
​

 

[proffesso]

He must be talking about the cars models in the selection screen.

What is a major difference in the detail level of the cars from GT4?
There are 400,000 polygons per car, 100 times more than were present on GT4. GT4 had 4,000 polygons per car. You can customize and tune the cars, too.

http://www.autoweek.com/article/20091103/SEMA/911039983#
​

even 400k per car your looking at some serious data loading off disc, even if its just for the selection screen. and even then, im really doubting that number. in-game would be substantially less, and probably quite aggressively lod'd as well.

how many cars do they want on-screen again?

 

[Turok]

This whole polygon count business reminds me of reading something that said Fight Night 3 had in-game poly counts of 3 million for the fighters. Sounds quite ridiculous to me, but I was wondering if there was any merit to it.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Got the d'Artiste book, and it has a bit of info on the poly counts for KZ2.

A lot of the art was outsourced to Massive Black in China, and Liquid Development in the US.

The Helghast Sniper had to fit into a poly budget of 10000 triangles, but it seems they've got to around 11K in the end; it has three more discreet LOD versions, each with half the poly count and the second one is 5500 tris. It does use overlapped UVs and thus mirrored normal maps (a somewhat tricky issue) to conserve texture space.

Spec maps have three grayscale channels in RGB: spec intensity, spec cosine power (glossiness) and Fresnel intensity (incidence angle dependent specular strenght). They're also using detail maps to add high freq detail in close-ups.

They also had a preview tool that reproduced their deferred renderer within the Maya viewports.

Will edit to continue with the Rico stuff once I've read it

 

[AlNom]

This whole polygon count business reminds me of reading something that said Fight Night 3 had in-game poly counts of 3 million for the fighters. Sounds quite ridiculous to me, but I was wondering if there was any merit to it.

Source model to generate the normal maps.

 

[ultragpu]

Will edit to continue with the Rico stuff once I've read it

Awesome stuff.
Got my copy too, had a fast read through so I might have missed a lot. The Rico's head has about 4.5k polys and they added a wrinkle map on top. They didn't mention anything about the texture resolution though but did use 4 UV maps for all the body parts if I understood correctly? Isn't 4 a bit much for realtime, I thought 2 UV maps are kinda the limit in realtime.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

This is a lot more complicated then that.

Originally the Sniper's been UVd so that it sits on one big quadrangular map, however the UVs are also divided into 4 equal sized quadrants so that the 1 texture map can be split up into 4 smaller textures if necessary. In the end though, it used two layouts, one for the head and one for the rest.

Now, there are no limits on how many maps you can use. However as far as I know, a single draw call can use only one set of textures and one shader, so if you split your model up, you need to draw it in more calls. Which is why it's rare to use more then two.
I'm not sure why most studios prefer for example two 2048*2048 maps instead of one 2048*4096 though.

No word about texture resolution in the game, but that's OK. 1-2 x 2K is the most common texture size for such characters anyway.

Yeah, seems like human characters use a wrinkle map on top of blendshapes for facial animation. They've written a custom Maya node for it (want), but only use one layer (Uncharted has two, I might need three). They're using Maya's shader editor for all of their custom stuff as it seems.

Some more interesting tech stuff:
- 90% of the characters have been outsourced. What were those 100+ guys doing at Guerilla then? But it certainly supports the superhigh budget theories, having to outsource that much work means a lot of salaries and other expenses on top of the Netherlands studio.
- A fully completed and polished character in general takes 3-4 months of work. Ouch, that's even more then what we spend!
- Most faces were based on real people, hired from a professional model agency.
- 4500 tri per head also includes eyes, teeth, and various eye helper geometry (for eyelashes, and for catching proper speculars I guess).
- They multiply the specular pass in the G-buffer with the SSAO pass, so that occluded areas don't get any specular highlights. Clever stuff, and something you can only do with deferred rendering.

Nice stuff there, with lots of pretty huge images from the game engine.

 

[AlNom]

I'm not sure why most studios prefer for example two 2048*2048 maps instead of one 2048*4096 though.

GPUs pre-NV40 or pre-R520 didn't support higher than 2k x 2k textures, so that wouldn't be a problem for RSX... Different shaders being applied

 

[Shifty Geezer]

- ...But it certainly supports the superhigh budget theories, having to outsource that much work means a lot of salaries and other expenses on top of the Netherlands studio.
...
- Most faces were based on real people, hired from a professional model agency.

Is this a sensible, economical approach? To my eyes, KZ2's characters aren't any better looking or more realistic than other titles, so what's the point in hiring models? If you could scan them and create a model in minutes/hours, it'd be worthwhile. But if you're still spending an age on modelling, the added expense of real life models strikes me as wasteful.