Is 6k+ tris count too much for a single-story building?

[henrylzy 1]

I'm new to asset modeling and currently working on a single-story building, 45m x 45m, 6m in height, with 2048 x 2048 texture.

The building in real life have so much details that I don't wanna just throw them away and texture them on a single face. But the tris count went up so quickly that it already reached 6k+ tris when I finished 80% of it.

I'm trying to balance the size of the texture and the tris count, but if I downsized the texture, there is no reason for me to keep that many details since it already looks pretty blurry in Blender, even with the 2048 x 2048 texture.

I took a break on modeling it and trying to find some examples about how much impact it will cause to the game for an asset that has this much tris, and almost all of the assets I found with this much tris are detailed multi-story buildings.

Could you please give me some of your insights on this so I could know if I'm still in the safe zone or I should start fixing it before it's too late.

Thanks

[Delta2k5 311]

Hello!

 

In my oppinion deciding if something has too many tris really depends on many factors.

First of all it depends on your descission on how to model the building - the bigger the texture size the less tris you might need as you may not need to cut windows in detail. If you cut windows you can save texture space as you can use a small set of textures for the windows and simply repeat them all over the place.

Also it depends on the use case - is the building going to be a landmark? If yes it's probably only placed one time in a city. If it's something different like a growable (which it obviously is not looking at the footprint  ) it should be rather lowpoly as many of these buildings will pop up.

The next question which you can answer to yourself is: how close you wanna get with the camera ingame? I saw many highly detailed buildings intended to be viewed in first person (using mods). Well, the game is not build to be a first person shooter so I always keep in mind it's viewed from the distance by the majority 

The CO 3D artists seem also to be unsure on which is the right tris count on things. Some small props (barrel pallets) and other things (carousel) are exceeding 10k tris by far! Others are just about 500 tris.

TBH. my current project (a CTA 3200 subway car) is also at 6k by now but the LOD distance is shorter than the one of a building and some meshes I use are only visible in certain situations

 

So my conlusion on this topic is:

• Think about what really is visible ingame not just in editor
• Use the possibilities (Normal mapping, working with alphas (e.g. on tiny structures)
• Keep the usecase in mind (used more seldom == more tris possible)
• Check the vanilla buildings on their tris count using mod tools to get some idea on what the devs had in mind

 

You probably should post some pictures of your mesh - it's hard to tell if you could save some tris without knowing the mesh

 

Best regards

[Avanya 2,605]

Do you have a screenshot of the model perhaps? Like Delta2k5 said it really depends on a lot of things and it's hard to give you any sort of helpful feedback without a better sense of the building. Simple cube shaped buildings are easier to keep a low tris count for, while anything with a dome or a sphere or just circular just can't be done properly with a super low tris count. 

For performance for most users it's also often more important to keep the texture size low than the tris count. Most people run out of RAM before their GPU gets stressed out by rendering tris.  Again this completely depends on the building. Some buildings have a lot of the same texture all over, so we can overlap areas and save space, while for other buildings that just can't be done without the building looking bad because of it.

[henrylzy 1]

21 hours ago, Delta2k5 said:

Hello!

 

In my oppinion deciding if something has too many tris really depends on many factors.

First of all it depends on your descission on how to model the building - the bigger the texture size the less tris you might need as you may not need to cut windows in detail. If you cut windows you can save texture space as you can use a small set of textures for the windows and simply repeat them all over the place.

Also it depends on the use case - is the building going to be a landmark? If yes it's probably only placed one time in a city. If it's something different like a growable (which it obviously is not looking at the footprint  ) it should be rather lowpoly as many of these buildings will pop up.

The next question which you can answer to yourself is: how close you wanna get with the camera ingame? I saw many highly detailed buildings intended to be viewed in first person (using mods). Well, the game is not build to be a first person shooter so I always keep in mind it's viewed from the distance by the majority 

The CO 3D artists seem also to be unsure on which is the right tris count on things. Some small props (barrel pallets) and other things (carousel) are exceeding 10k tris by far! Others are just about 500 tris.

TBH. my current project (a CTA 3200 subway car) is also at 6k by now but the LOD distance is shorter than the one of a building and some meshes I use are only visible in certain situations

 

So my conlusion on this topic is:

• Think about what really is visible ingame not just in editor
• Use the possibilities (Normal mapping, working with alphas (e.g. on tiny structures)
• Keep the usecase in mind (used more seldom == more tris possible)
• Check the vanilla buildings on their tris count using mod tools to get some idea on what the devs had in mind

 

You probably should post some pictures of your mesh - it's hard to tell if you could save some tris without knowing the mesh

 

Best regards

 

20 hours ago, Avanya said:

Do you have a screenshot of the model perhaps? Like Delta2k5 said it really depends on a lot of things and it's hard to give you any sort of helpful feedback without a better sense of the building. Simple cube shaped buildings are easier to keep a low tris count for, while anything with a dome or a sphere or just circular just can't be done properly with a super low tris count. 

For performance for most users it's also often more important to keep the texture size low than the tris count. Most people run out of RAM before their GPU gets stressed out by rendering tris.  Again this completely depends on the building. Some buildings have a lot of the same texture all over, so we can overlap areas and save space, while for other buildings that just can't be done without the building looking bad because of it.

Thanks for the replies Delta2k5 and Avanya.

The building is going to be a landmark and there is no reason to have multiple of it in the city.

 

As you can see from the screenshot, the beams has more than 2k tris just because there are a lot of them.

 

I'm still trying to figure out how well the normal map performs in the game. So far I cut almost every windows, but if the normal map works really well and it has a similar outcome on showing the depth, they'll gone.

[Ocram's Razr 964]

Normal maps plus alpha (transparency) maps can drastically reduce triangle count. You don’t have to model individual minibeams.