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

[Neb]

I don't know, my estimation was around 4-5000...
It may not have hairs but it has teeth and some realistic facial animations.
I find it impressive anyway.

Yeah incredible face animations and detail. Eclipses HL2's face animations.

I found this ss from the character editor for Crysis, it shows polygon counts for the exo skelleton suit.

http://www.crysis-online.com/Media/Screenshots/Screenshots/character_editor.jpg

 

[groper]

Yeah incredible face animations and detail. Eclipses HL2's face animations.

I found this ss from the character editor for Crysis, it shows polygon counts for the exo skelleton suit.

http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w193/NebulasPhotoPocket/character_editor.jpg

I have seen this before but that model is not ingame.

Anyway i did a search and it seems that Laa-Yosh was right :smile:
From an interview with Michael Khaimzon , Art director of crysis :

DirtyRat: Cool. How detailed are the character models? (in polygons)
Michael: The heads are 2500-3000 polygons and the bodies are about 5000 polygons or so.

 

[Neb]

I have seen this before but that model is not ingame.

Anyway i did a search and it seems that Laa-Yosh was right :smile:
From an interview with Michael Khaimzon , Art director of crysis :

Interesting I would have tought it to be much higher for the body considering the smoothness of the hands and overall. :smile:

Although the interview is from Dec '06 and I wonder if they have upped the polygon count for the beta?

 

[Farid]

I updated the main post with the latest info everybody gathered.

Props to the posters who collected the info so far.

 

[AlNom]

Dead or Alive series, Xbox, 2001-2004
Character - ~10,000

Tina's model in DOAX is at least 14605 polygons according to this:

http://unrealtournament2004.filefront.com/file/DOAX_Tina;27917

I may be able to extract the model files from DOA3/DOAU/DOAX (and possibly other Xbox titles depending on how they store the data) through um... some means. I'll have to look into it later this week or Tuesday evening.

 

[Nesh]

i always wanted to know how many poly did silent hill 3 pushed, til this day this game visual is pretty impressive.

I am curious as well. The PS2 didnt do any normal mapping yet the detail on these characters rival many of today's next gen models.

How did they manage to achieve that level of detail on PS2 with only polygons is beyond me. If I showed to a casual SH3's cut scenes and a CGI movie he wouldnt have spotted the difference.

 

[Obakan]

Yeah incredible face animations and detail. Eclipses HL2's face animations.

I found this ss from the character editor for Crysis, it shows polygon counts for the exo skelleton suit.

http://www.crysis-online.com/Media/Screenshots/Screenshots/character_editor.jpg

This one is in-game taken from the first level "contact" when you jump from a plane down to the water and then swim to the beach.
8000 Polygons for a NK soldier sounds not realistic to me but if they are 8000 polygons then Crytek must have invented some kind of new techniques that makes it look even if it´s 8000 polys, or maybe 8000polys was just the polygon count for another charachter we havnt seen yet?
NK Soldier (and here´s a movie when a NK soldier gets throwned away):
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w193/NebulasPhotoPocket/crysis4.jpg
Honestly that interview is from Novmber 2006 the game was Pre-aplha back then, I think they have changed a lot since back then.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

About the faces -- I've been playing around with a tool cool FaceGen recently, and I was very impressed with how organic the faces turned out. By organic, I mean they don't look like they're made of polygons. All the faces I've made so far are composed of over 5000 polygons. I think 5000 polygons (not exactly, but you get what I mean) is the magic number for making faces look good. The newest FaceGen even allows you to take a photo and have them sculpt a face out of it. It was amazing. I even took an anime (3D anyway) character screen shot from a game and it was recreated brilliantly on FaceGen. I don't think FaceGen uses normal mapping in anyway. I'm sure you can use even less polygons to make a great looking face without having to use 5000 polygons.

Now here are some number for Rogue Squadron on the Gamecube.

"The X-Wing model is the original model used by Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), for special effects in the Stars Wars film and includes ILM's textures and shaders. The X-Wing alone is comprised of 30,000 polygons and the pilot has 4,000 polygons!"

This quote came straight from that Segatech website.

This is from EGM Number 144

"Director Tosti says the new Rogue Squadron flexes between 12,000 and 25,000 polys on its ships, 30,000 on terrains 13,000 on an AT-AT, and 3,000 on each Tie Fighter."

There's only one issue so far and that's the pilot's polygon count. In EGM, it says each pilot is about 8,000 compared to the 4,000 polys from Segatech. I don't know who's right and who's wrong.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

How did they manage to achieve that level of detail on PS2 with only polygons is beyond me.

They've achieved it with some very nice textures. A lot of the shading is painted in, so it's static, but looks good nonetheless, though nowhere near CGI...

 

[Laa-Yosh]

You shouldn't use programs like Facegen to judge game art. Most professional modelers can create far better assets than those, there's a reason why such apps aren't really used in the industry.

 

[StefanS]

There's only one issue so far and that's the pilot's polygon count. In EGM, it says each pilot is about 8,000 compared to the 4,000 polys from Segatech. I don't know who's right and who's wrong.

IIRC, the model is not from the Star Wars: Special Edition. That was misreported, Eggbrecht said they were using their own models which a higher polycount, allegedly.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

You shouldn't use programs like Facegen to judge game art. Most professional modelers can create far better assets than those, there's a reason why such apps aren't really used in the industry.

I see. I just brought it up cause it was tons of fun. I'm sure professionals wouldn't have to resort to such tools to make their games.

IIRC, the model is not from the Star Wars: Special Edition. That was misreported, Eggbrecht said they were using their own models which a higher polycount, allegedly.

No no, they're talking about the humans in the game. I wasn't questioning the ships.

 

[Farid]

Tina's model in DOAX is at least 14605 polygons according to this:

http://unrealtournament2004.filefront.com/file/DOAX_Tina;27917

I may be able to extract the model files from DOA3/DOAU/DOAX (and possibly other Xbox titles depending on how they store the data) through um... some means. I'll have to look into it later this week or Tuesday evening.

Updated to 10,000-15,000 polygons. Looking forward to your reverse engineering findings.

I also added Crysis 67K nano suit info, althought I added the caveat that we're not certain it's an in-game model. I mean, there's quite a different between a 67k polys model for the main character (you rarely see it in game, though) and the 12-15K polys other characters. It's not impossible, since it's the main character and the model isn't rendered all the time, but still it quite the discrepancy.

IIRC, the model is not from the Star Wars: Special Edition. That was misreported, Eggbrecht said they were using their own models which a higher polycount, allegedly.

I'm not fond of Factor 5 numbers, really. I don't even know why I added Lair's Dragon model info, I can quite imagine the whole terrain meshe info being right, but the 150K polys dragon seems quite a lot more than what the pictures show. Maybe a cut-scene model (maybe is the keyword here)...

Now, their GC Star Wars game info is really hard to believe, I mean they claimed crazy stuff like 12 up-to 20 Million polygons per second for their Rogue Squadron games. They might mean 12-20M pps in the world scene, or without factoring LOD, or they're counting inputed polygons and not rendered ones. It could also be a mix of all these reasons. But since they never get into the details about these random peak values they talk about in gaming mags, it's hard to consider them seriously.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

67K is a loot, keep in mind it has to be skinned, used for player shadows and such things as well.

Lair poly numbers are probably the original resolution, but I think the progressive meshing decimates them considerably. Before they've tuned the models' settings, it even did things like removing more vertices from the leathery part of the wing and cracks appeared between the wing and the fingers.

 

[fearsomepirate]

I'm not fond of Factor 5 numbers, really.

I suspect that the high polycount for the ship model is for the hangar models, not for the in-flight models. Some of those ships in the hangar have a ton of geometry, and it's not like the hangar itself has much.

 

[AlNom]

Updated to 10,000-15,000 polygons. Looking forward to your reverse engineering findings.

I've only just done a quick test, but here's what I found for Tina. From what I could see of the wireframes, the models received an increase in polygon count between DOA3 and DOAU/DOAX. For the future I'll try to compare models with the same suits. It'll take some time, but there are a gazillion models with the different costumes between DOA3 and DOAU and DOAX.

Tina Costume1
DOA3 = 13361
DOAU = 16736

In DOAX, the models were stored without ah... clothes with the appropriate swim suits applied in-engine. So the individual items contribute too. I'm not sure how culling was handled (if at all) when you played the game and applied the suits so... I'm not sure how one might want to account for the extra items and accessories that can be outfitted on the girls. I'll just get the individual poly counts as time goes.

So this is what I found when I put in Tina's "base" DOAX model along with the camou-bikini that I linked earlier. In the UT link, the ReadMe implies that he fiddled with the model to reduce the polycount... I suspect he only eliminated poly's that you didn't see beneath the bikini.

Tina base model = 13765
Tina + camou-bikini = 15416 (Yes, that one bikini is 1651 poly's )

The base models in DOAX aren't quite comparable to those in DOAU either. There are... differing areas of emphasis. I'll put it that way.

*I won't be posting any screenshots or specific methodologies here... It could mean trouble.

 

[Nesh]

They've achieved it with some very nice textures. A lot of the shading is painted in, so it's static, but looks good nonetheless, though nowhere near CGI...

You are far from being a casual

If I showed to a casual SH3's cut scenes and a CGI movie he wouldnt have spotted the difference.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

They would. People have incredibly sophisticated instinctive senses for recognizing human faces. That's why it's so hard to create a truly lifelike CG human that could fool the audience. They couldn't tell the difference, but they'd know.

 

[DeadlyNinja]

I suspect that the high polycount for the ship model is for the hangar models, not for the in-flight models. Some of those ships in the hangar have a ton of geometry, and it's not like the hangar itself has much.

That might explain why my pilot numbers vary! The one that claims the pilots were made of 8,000 polygons specifically says they're in the hanger. I honestly don't see the point of rendering the entire personal when half of their body is obstructed from view when they're inside the cockpit.

 

[Nesh]

They would. People have incredibly sophisticated instinctive senses for recognizing human faces. That's why it's so hard to create a truly lifelike CG human that could fool the audience. They couldn't tell the difference, but they'd know.

I am not talking about 100% realistic CGI human face that can not be distinguished from a real face vs Silent Hill 3.

Anyways I did show the game to friends at the time of release and they didnt believe that was done real time on the PS2. I was initially fooled as well.

You work on CGI movies so its easier for you to spot the difference and you are also much more used to better quality CGI movies