rf2 able to process more polys? or just a rummer?

Johannes. The best thing to do is model in Quads but count the poly budget in triangles. Don't use more then 40,000 triangles. Which should be close to 20,000 polygon. What you want to do is use 40,000 triangles for the main car exterior with tires and brakes and everything that is needed along with low poly cockpit. Then make a separate high poly model at about 20,000 triangles. This should be more then sufficient at acquiring the best quality at a reasonable poly budget. That is similar to what we do. We are also always willing to help train modelers who wish to learn modding at anytime so if anyone wishes any advice or help, feel free to contact me.

Oh another thing, the reason we model in quads is because engines today read quads better then triangles. You still however do use triangles where its needed, but just as little as possible.

 

Johannes, you have it spot on. Making a good looking model with as least poly's as possible is the difference between doing it right and doing it wrong.
Use the shaders to enhance them instead of adding in more poly's. You can define edges with spec maps and curves with bump maps. In a cockpit you can use multa maps to add AO.

Most shift models are ~15k What makes them look good are the shaders they they use.

Anyone here played Mafia II? those cars are all ~10k, once again it's the shaders that make them look good.

 

Doesn't GMT export turn all polys to triangles? But yes I do model in quads for sure, and only once in a while having to throw some triangles there.

 

When working in quads, you have to understand that the program still reads them as triangles so a quad will still be read as two triangles even though it appears as a quad. In some objects, according to smoothing, it retains the quads, it doesn't convert them to triangles because triangles don't smooth. If you don't use smoothing groups however I presume that it would convert them to triangles although that will not affect the poly count

 

When talking about "polycounts" you always want to refer to them as triangles. The real polycount is how many triangles are in the current scene, even though 3D Studio Max treats quads as polygons. There is an option in Max to reveal the triangle count which is, again, considered the "real" polycount as far as games are concerned. I've seen some cars that claim to have 8K polygons, but in reality it has over 17 thousand triangles. That's a huge difference. When you see games these days, they do have a polygon limit, but keep in mind that polygons and triangles are not necessarily the same thing.

If you want to set a polygon limit for yourself, make sure you find that option in MAX (under statistics) and reveal the triangle count. This will ensure that you have the actual poly count.

 

That's a good point you bring up GTFREAK, in general a modeller will refer to poly count as quads knowing that the tri count is about doubled.

I'm curious to know how many people refer to poly limits as counted tri's or poly's. IE, Lesiu states that 50k polys is acceptable for rf1, but if you have a look at my little experiment I posted you will see how much a 50k poly car can pull a system down. That car if counted in tri's is ~100k tri's. If Lesiu is referring to tri's then a 25k poly car is a good amount to have, although probably still a little bit high.

I think it is important to save confusion that we all understand what we see as a poly. ie, 20k poly or 40k tri model is acceptable in today's game's.

 

you should always use triangles to count poly budgets. Not polygon. So people should say 50k tri's, rather then 50k poly. Counting in triangles is far better as that is the exact number the game will read, poly will always be less then tri's so it just becomes confusing if you count in polygons. Go with Tri's

 

Let's take the WSGT2 mod as an example.

Over at SMCars.net Arnold Wong explains that his cars are around 30-50K triangles. He also explains that with rFactor, it wasn't so much a matter of triangles or polygons as it is a matter of optimizing shadows. I'd like to point out here that there are other factors involved here. I can have 50+ cars on the screen with each car having around 100K triangles with relatively good FPS. Now, when you attach 4096x4096 textures to them and add shadows to each car, that's when the FPS starts to take a nose dive. So it isn't so much a matter of triangles or polycounts these days. With modern graphics cards, it's easy to handle a decent amount of polygons. The real trouble comes in when large textures are introduced and these textures are not optimized. By optimized I mean every single inch of that texture being used. I've seen some mods that have several large textures when the person mapping the car could have used one large texture for every single part on that car.

It's really up to the mod team how these things are handled.

I won't say that the polycount isn't important, and I won't pretend to know everything about graphics cards or graphics engines, but I will say that the polycount isn't as important as it used to be when you factor in other things like large textures and shadows.

 

This is something I am working on. The exterior shell has 1304 tris right now, but there are areas that need more work and polys too. Smoothing either is not very refined yet. Right now tires/rims are eating a lot, I've yet to decide how I want to deal with them. Anyway, I think it is quite acceptable quality (rF1 probably) and there is plenty of room for details. Rear view mirrors and door handles comes to mind. Idea is also to have detailed chassis so that car would be all around detailed.

It is good to hear that polycount is usually referred as tri-count, makes a lot more sense with these numbers discussed here

 

can you also show a wireframe version?

 

Edited the earlier post

 

Looking at your wireframe model you have a good flow of poly. One other good thing you have done is that you have kept the flow from the wheel arches onto the body. This is quite important as it keeps the mesh flow clean. Like LesiU said, in your model's case you do not need to go very high poly (triangles). It is a van with many straight panel areas. What you should concentrate more on cars/vans is making the round areas as smooth as possible so you don't see the polygon edges, but you seem to be doing a great job so far. Keep up the great work.

 

Nice work Lesiu . Yes I did set it up for worst case scenario, what you did though is what I should have done but I cut it short, I really appreciate the extra work you put in. What would be interesting now is if the textures were shrunk.

That's cool now I see what you mean by poly's. I thought it might be like that. When I first started modelling, I posted a pic of my model and said it was 60k polys and the other guys on the team went "WHATTA?!?!" I was supposed to be going for 15k, that's when I realised that I needed to count poly's as quads rather than tri's. So I had made a 30k poly model (which obviously needed trimming down) instead of what they thought was a 120k tri model . Ever since then I have referred to poly count as quads. But in truth, a poly can have many sides. You create a cylinder in max you see the ends have no edges. although they are many tri's, max sees it as 1 poly. So in the end there are 2 things, poly count and tri count, Now no one will be confused


GTFREAK, I have been thinking about what you said about using smaller textures on a high poly model. I think if your going to go to the trouble to build a high poly model then you don't want to ruin it by putting a low quality texture on it. I'd say they both go hand in hand, the more poly's the bigger the texture, otherwise it would be defeating the point. Would you agree?
If you were to take the cockpit for example, to get any clarity in a single tex it would need it to be at least 2048x2048, either that or tile textures for large areas, which means more materials and once again defeats the purpose.

Regarding using the whole texture for best optimisation, I am pretty sure that you don't have to use the whole face of a texture to get the best optimisation. It is a common practice in game design to use only small parts of a single texture for many things. afaik, the game only has to render what's on a face, so in theory, if you had a 2048x4096 texture and only used the first 128x128 of it, the game would only have to render that 128x part and the rest of the texture would not effect anything. Weather or not the rf engine does it like this is another question, but I'd say it does. I will do some more research on that and get back if I find anything. :thumbsup:

 

Thanks guys. It is definitely little bit easier on polys as being a van, later when doing old 50's Buick for example it will quite heavier.

LesiU nice that you made those tests with mianiaks models. Some hard fact there. I always try to ease things by providing "not so detailed" shadow box model. I think shadows doesn't need to be so detailed. In the end human brain tends to fill up missing details if at least the actual car model is good. Shadow still is only 2D projection of a 3D shape.

 

Actually, what I was saying was there isn't any need to use several large textures when one large texture would be sufficient. In other words, when you can fit all of your mapping onto one large, high res texture, there isn't any need to spread the mapping out onto several large, high res textures because this bogs down the system.

Yes, I agree that high res textures are needed for certain things, but this is where optimization is key. For example, why would you map something that is hardly ever seen in the game, as big as possible? That wouldn't make much sense. This is where optimizing texture mapping is important. You have to decide what will be seen and what won't be seen. Then you can map the car accordingly. I don't remember saying you should use smaller textures sizes, but if I did then I apologize. That's not what I meant. =)

 

Very interested to bring this thread back to life for an opinion on where poly count benchmarks sit currently. PC Hardware has seen some vast improvements over the past 3 years as has the game itself with performance improvements and the introduction of the 64bit executables. From the best of my knowledge at the time of this thread we were utilising build 49 or less and we are currently able to use stable build 798 or unstable build 841 so suffice to say the game has evolved quite a bit since the tests were completed.

Below is the poly counts (Tris from my interpretation of the thread) from the testing that was completed in 2011.

Below shows the results achieved by LeSiu using "My HW: Ati HD5850 @ stock (725/1000), Intel i3 540 @ stock (3,06GHz)"

So the billion dollar question is what are the TRI Poly Counts we should be aiming for a mod now days? Is what was seen as worst case scenario 3 years ago now an acceptable level or even perhaps underestimating the potential of what is capable with todays hardware and software?

 

Hard values aren't as important I think. Just aim for as little as you can get by. If a car is looking stunning using 30k triangles, no need to put in more just for the sake of it. It's not only triangles obviously which
are going to hurt performance when you over-use them.

 

I absolutely agree with you on that one and I also understand that the texture sizes and amount of textures will also play their part in overall performance. I am just trying to gauge what could be aimed for to ensure for those with high end PCs the mod is as visually pleasing and lifelike as it can be whilst ensuring those with the minimum spec PCs for RF2 can still enjoy the mod. Although it takes some additional work you can eliminate the nice to haves from the Max setting version to help reach the High setting version optimal poly count and so forth for the Medium and Low. I'm just interested to know what people think those numbers could be for Max, High, Medium, Low given what we have today.