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

In his GDC talk Chris Roberts explains how the scale of the game works in their favour, since if you're close enough to see the highest LOD on a fighter it'll take up the whole screen and they don't have to render anything else. On a shooter or a game like God of War you render many other things in addition to highly detailed characters.

 

For things like characters and ships that's true. Things like brick walls can of course get by with coarse base meshes.

 

Not if you use DX11 tesselator, maximum tesselation factor is 64.
It's not simply enough for a wall of a city or even a wall of a house. (with 1cm details you can have up to 64cm area to tessellate..)

I wonder if next generation console games will use additional compute shader for pre-tesselation of huge surfaces.

 

In CryEngine 3 presentation they had very few polygons on a wall and tessellated it well
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugFWtLaTwpo&feature=player_detailpage#t=257s

 

That's quite tesselated wall with maximum polygon size around 1 meter.

 

A coarse base mesh doesn't mean two triangles for a wall. Just that the triangles can be large and don't need to contain a lot of detail by themselves. When modeling something like a character on the other hand the base mesh needs to contain some details which I believe is the situation Rodéric was thinking about.

In the future some games will pre-tessellate huge surfaces.

 

Indeed, since the thread was almost exclusively about character models, I didn't feel like I needed to be any more precise than I was.

 

Made a small coverage on Xbox One's Cloud based power claims and initial goals.

The Power Of Cloud


Microsoft Spokesman Adam Pollington -

http://www.thesixthaxis.com/2013/05...-powerful-with-the-cloud-claims-spokesperson/
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My take on this is -

Even though internet connections may get better (and maybe reach all regions) , I think there's still doubt in how much data will be offloaded. In comparison to how much bandwidth CPU and GPU buses have; I think it's much simpler to use the bandwidth of next door than streamed over a connection...unless Microsoft has a different method of utilization.

 

Is 40k polygons enough to create a near photorealistic character as long as you have plenty of shading and textures? For example, would 40 k be enough to create a real time 7 of 9 from Star Trek Voyager?

 

I guess we know where this is going... dare I ask why this particular model ... asking for a friend ?

 

don't suppose anyone here has access to the battlefield 4 beta and can get some of the numbers?

 

I wish we could get exact numbers for the polygons used in the technical did the dark sorcerer it would be very interesting to find out exactly how many polygons were used in the scenes where they were multiple characters

 

seven of nine is one of my favorite Star Trek characters also she has very nice long blonde hair and I would like to know how many polygons it takes to model for long perfect hair

 

Pro Evolution Soccer 2014

2000 for heads

http://franchiseplay.net/2013/03/14/pes-2014-more-details-about-visual-enhancements-and-new-engine/

figured i'd post it since its fox engine

 

hoping to see some Last Of Us numbers and wires. Great game and there's some zbrush works on zbrushcentral which really show the detail they put into the game and its normal maps

 

Only time will tell.

Being a Ps3 game, everyone will have to wait for the developers to share.


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Polygon Numbers For Assorted Games.

Resident Evil Revelations - Jill Valentine 10,257 polygons
Resident Evil Revelations - Parker Luciani 10,872 polygons
Metal Gear Rising Revengeance - Gekko 22,605 polygons
Remember ME - Nilin 22,684 polygons
Remember ME - Nilin (prisoner outfit) 27,833 polygons

That's all i have for the time to share.


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Continuing a little bit on Cloud gaming functions,

I have two theories on how it could work. according to microsoft cloud processing doesn't falling into any requirements for usage, though even still with that said and no mater how many theories comprised, a good internet connection is required to see the payoff.

the first theory of mine revolves around the basis of Servers rendering all aspects of games while receiving input and streaming as media in return. the internet connection speed would depend on the native resolution signal aimed to achieved, input lag is usually mild on connection usage.

The second theory of mine revolves around what Dan greenawalt (from Turn10) said,

Many properties within environments can be static, such as buildings, Houses, bridges, floors, ect (static landscapes.) Anyways, a lot of the rendering can be offloaded leaving the console to handle physics, characters, effects, and other qualities.

In order of internet usage. (rough estimate.)

. Streaming video output, Mild (depends on the resolution signal)
. Computational Data offloading, High (depends on the type of data offloaded.)
. Simulating actual Memory bandwidth, Very high.
. Simulating actual GPU bandwidth, very high.

 

Spoke with one of the character artists from Naughty dog who shared this info on Last Of Us with me-

Tri count for in-game Joel was around 30k including hair, excluding his backpack. Joel was using 1024 or 512 textures separated into many maps (head, hair, watch, arms, torso, pants, shoes).

 

http://www.dualshockers.com/2013/06...ddr5-ram-1-million-polygons-just-for-the-set/
The Dark Sorcerer PS4 Tech Demo Used Only 4 GB of GDDR5 RAM, 1 Million Polygons Just for the Set
The demo, that has absolutely no pre-rendering, post production or video inserts, represents only the first iteration of Quantic Dream’s development cycle for the PS4, and while it runs between 30 and 90 fps (the frame rate wasn’t optimized yet), it does so at native 1080p resolution, textures included. The developer still didn’t have access to full PS4 development tools, so they had to make do with the same PS3 development pipeline used for Beyond: Two Souls “shoving in a bunch of high-fidelity assets”.

The set alone is made of a whopping one million triangles, and the volumetric lighting is completely dynamic between “movie” conditions and “studio” conditions. It can be switched at will within a single frame. The most impressive part? It only uses four of the eight gigabytes of GDRR5 RAM under the hood of the PS4.

Maurice the Goblin is made by 67,000 triangles, 40 different shaders, 150 Megabytes of texture data, and can be defined a CG-quality model despite running in real time. He has 388 different bones in his “body”.

 

that sounds interesting. I think they went a little more resourceful on the models this time around. i really would like to see if naughtydog releases any coverage on that game.

I had a feeling he was that much. I still think the old Sorcerer himself is around 80 -100,000 polygons with high quality textures and Subsurface scattering, all that stuff. It looks fantastic, though considering it's still in a controlled space with no real AI, it shouldn't be that difficult to get at least 1 or 2 high rez characters on screen.

 

Michael Knowland (lead character Artist) and Adam Scott (character Artist) posted there zbrush works here-
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?1027594&p=1027594&viewfull=1#post1027594

They speak about the models and pipelines.