You CAN keep a model at about 10k polies, but its not very efficient. With weapons, our Warlord is about 8600 polies. It probably hovers at around 4300-4500 without them. I know that Spawn uses high poly models for TNG. But poly count limits all depend on your computer.



Edited by - parabolix on 6/12/2004 10:03:23 AM

continuing the parabolix said if you're machine is med/recommended spec and it runs fine then hand it out with a warning,

if how ever it runs like a backwards slug you have a problem and you need to shave off a few thousnad polies

also if you have a dream computer which can run any and everything including the entire secret service the you need to drag some Ram OUT of youre computer to bring it back down to earth

It's eyes were completly devoid of life,
Empty Orbs that took in the world with an unfeeling gaze,
A thin trail of blood ran from a fresh wound,
But it would not or could not tend to it,
Only one thing ever brought a spark of vitality,
To the eyes of this Tortured Soul:
The Suffering of others.

When i first started doing models, I emailed Giskard about this very subject.

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Gikard replied:

I use the Selpolycount to get the poly count after selecting the entire ship. So what ever it says in there, that's what people are referring too.

The average is 3000 per model but I dont believe there is a limit. However, if all your models have 21,000 polies then each one of your models will be the equivalent of 7 normal ones. Once you hit 16 models in space some computers start to crash. So that would be 3 of yours at 21000 polys = 1 crash.

Hope that explains it a bit better
Im not sure if the crashes relate to the poly count like I've said above but the 16 ship barrier does appear to exist and does cause crashes. Others have said battleships cause crashes too when there are a few of them on the screen so I may well be right here.

Giskard

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* This info is on TLR - somewhere...lol though finding ot could be hard..

Harrier.


Retreat[![! ---- I'm too badly messed up now[![!

personally I have never gone above 2000 polys, and with most of my recent ships being under 1000 triangles. Thing is when you make a ship, you have to consider the fact that you are making it not just for yourself, but for others as well, and you have to consider that some are using built into motherboard vidoe cards which can't handel the type of demads your putting on it.

It is true that some freelancer ships like cap ships get up to 10,000 polys, but those are for the most part considered static bases. They weren't designed to have a large swarm of them at once as you do with smaller fighter crafts, also they have lods. Could you imagine if you took a misison where all the hostile npcs, all the friendly npcs, and your own ship are all around 8000 faces and on top of that the poly count for any asteroids or bases which may be around.

Or to make an example, perhaps one of the best ships I've ever seen was the phoenix from starlancer, I saw an imported and converted one of it and if I recall corectly it's poly count was around 300 faces. The reason why I mention this is people get sloppy with their ships and make things with a far higher poly count then it should ever be.

Truth of the matter, using more polys doesn't necesarily make your ship any better, it is the time and care you put into the uv mapping and the texture for a model which either make or break it, so you might as well keep the poly count down to optimize playability.

but hey if you have round surfaces the more polygons mostly means the less segmentation viewable

true but only to a degree, i've seen some people use 24 slice cylinders, and using multiple stacks for a straight sections, these are well over the amount for a noticable change in freelancer and really just a waste. But by using dodge and burn tools you can make a surface look more curved just by the texture. The main key to curvature is shading groups, though I am not entirely sure whether freelancer uses or the exporter keeps the shading groups when making a cmp, so might be moot, I still go through and make shading groups for all my models just because it makes them look much better when you make a html milkshape viewer.

Still the point remains, there is a limitation of how many polys you can use for a curve before it makes no difference what so ever, for rendering you can just keep subdividing, but eventually you will stop because it just doesn't make much of a difference anymore in regards to how your model looks when rendered. And rendering is much more poly sensative then what an ingame engine is, so your looking at having a much much lower need for polys for curves when regarding ingame models, because it just won't make enough of a difference to warrant additional polys.