Quote: "Sorry guys but the Ps2 can push a lot more polies than you seem to think. 2500 isn't really a huge amount these days."
I took the time to sit down and read that link.
Nice to see a bunch of people who have never touched these machines making nice guesses.
But that is all they are, guesses.
Unlike alot of those people, I have experience developing for the Playstation 2, GameCube, X-Box, and PC.
I can tell you roughly what the engines I've worked on allow, and what the hardware is technically capable of with raw data through-put.
When you look at a game like Final Fantasy X; people assume.
'Wow these are super high polygon'
Problem is they're not. Look at the hair on Tidus. It looks like it would be high polygon right? In total the hair comes to 28 polygons. I'm not joking. It is 2 layers one of which the vertices are adapted to animate from a weight in Maya. The top later has a transparency texture, which added with the movement gives a nice look to it. Problem is if those people were half the artist they claimed to be; they would've noticed quite evidently that Tidus' hair bends (with a visible line!) where the polygons are curved.
The reason the mesh look so smooth, is because unlike normal games, the Final Fantasy team decided to go with a different approach to shading. Where-in they use a Dot3 Phong Shading routine; It was still done per-vertex hense there are still indescripencies, but in major areas where the angles of the polygons were relatively low (ie the face) it would appear to have 2-3x more polygons than it really has.
You want a good example of this in a modern game you can literally look at the polygon details for, look at Doom3.
Almost every character in that game is under 2,000 polygons. Infact most are under 1,500 polygons.
Not only do artists have to worry about Polygons for each character but it's all the given situations.
When Tidus is running around the map, usually it is just him and the background so you have 1,500 for him... then around 25-30,000 for the map. So your not breaking the polygon bank; but when you get into a temple, your scene is still 30,000-ish BUT now you happen to have 10-15 NPCs that happen to also have 1,500 polygons.
Instantly your total scene count adds up to a huge amount.
(46,500poylgons) also you have to remember that TVs render these are 50-60FPS at relatively high resolutions (4:3) meaning the PS2 is rendering close to 2,790,000 per second.
A Pentium 2-266MHz / GeForce2 32MB / 256MB RAM, is capable of pushing around 3,000,000 poly/second total. Remember the Playstation 2 is only slightly more powerful, and we haven't even taken into consideration the screen based effects or other background tasks.
This is all of-course considering you want the entire game to actually run at full speed. GTA3 for example has horrible slow-downs, but from the polycount you can't really blame the PS2 for struggling. It is ageing technology.
Remember even the X-Box struggles with a game like Unreal Tournament, who models are generally around the 2,500 polygon mark.
[post.edit]
Sorry but this gave me a chuckle
Quote: "I personally think you can base current poly budgets on what massivly multi player games are doing. Starwars online for instance recently mentioned that there NPC models are 3000 polys and I know for a fact that many of there creature models are 5000+ polys .It really does depend on what platform you are talking about though
In my opnion the fallowing would probebly be close.
PC : 2000- 3000 polys for character models
PS2: 3-5000 polys would be pretty normal
Cube : 3-8000 polys is absolutly normal
x-box : 5000-15,000 poys is normal.
I do personal work on my portfolio from time to time and I usually shoot for 2-3000 poly models but there are certainly none forward thinking art director types who would toss your portfolio in the trash if you sent them anything over 1000-1500 polys. Then again I don't want to work on projects who shoot for the lowest budget PC's . Well unless it was the sims
I think that once you can get 5-10 poly characters how much more realistic do you need to get?? I wish they would put there efforts into things like RAM technology so we can use higher res textures and bump maps and other things that can give game models are more realistic feel. Ohh and some real-time lighting would be nice.
With like x-box 2 and PS3 we are gonna say"hey maybe we can build 10-20,000 poly models but at what expense??" I mean it already takes huge amounts of time to build and texture characters soon we are going to be moving into FILM time with these models ( 3-8 weeks
)"
