3D Modelling & Poly Count

Due to my job research and having meetings with my lecturer I have decided that instead of going all out and creating a model and animating it, I am only going to create a 3d model and rig it so that it is ready for animation, this will allow me to focus in one area and obtain a higher quality piece of work as a result.


The model that I want to create for my final project is a human male with an athletic body size, an example of this kind of body would be -















As well as making the base mesh for the character I also want to model and texture clothes for my model.

With all this being said I also have to think about the poly count of my model, I plan to design this character as if I was creating a main character for a game on last generations consoles (Xbox360).

Here is a list of some characters poly-count from games of the last generation:

Red Dead Redemption

John Marston - 14,980

Velvet Assassin
Violet - 14,219

The Amazing Spiderman
Spiderman - 11,652

Batman: Arkham Asylum
Bane - 25,000
Batman - 21,304
Killer Croc - 20,940

Looking at these statistics it looks as if main characters in games can fluctuate between 14,000 up to 25,000 polys, some games of last generation, for example, Uncharted 3, the main character in that game had 30,000 polygons for his model.

With this in mind I do not think that I should set myself a target polygon count that is close to these, as I just do not think it would be realistic on my part to get that amount of polygons made in the time that I have for this project, however, an ideal amount in my opinion is 10,000 polys, 8,000 for the model and 2,000 for the clothes, I think that this is a good estimate as it will give my character a high quality appearance and it also gives me room to adjust if I were to exceed the count.

-J.W