#4
14th Jan 2019 at 1:41 PM
Last edited by Lyralei : 14th Jan 2019 at
2:39 PM.
Objects, furniture, paintings etc. Something that a sim can interact with also have polycounts. Obviously, since they’re meshes! (Yep, even that plane-looking painting you downloaded!)
However, seeing what is high in polys here can be a difficult task, mainly since we don’t really have a “base” to guess from like we’d with CASpart and the sim body’s polycount. There is though a way to guess this which is through shapes! Obviously, this is also more experience-ish so you might have a moment where someone would say that something is way too high in polycount but you might think it’s decent.
The basics of understanding what shape will always be higher in polycount
Let’s take a look at this cube. Super simple looking, the shape is, well, blocky. This could be the shape of a table, door, computer, etc. But let’s see what the polycount for this cube is, which is 6. Pretty low am I right?
Now if we look at this sphere, it has quite some faces going on to make it look like a sphere really right? Now a couch can have a lot of roundish shapes, a cup, a pot, even a car. It’s okay if these meshes are a tad on the higher side of course! This sphere however is 519 polys although that doesn’t mean every rounded mesh should be that in polycount
What is normal between shapes that are a bit more blocky or rounded?
This really depends on the mesh. Say we made a super simple chair, no rounded bits, just a simple chair made out of cube shapes. It’s very common for that to be around ~300 in polycount (or about 100-200 added to it).
But, what about mixed shape-y meshes? Well, lemme tell you a story about polycounts… exciting!
I’ve been meshing for myself and for the sims for a good 6 years now, 2 years ago I became a staff member on the site and checking polycounts was of course the thing that needed checking to make sure that the meshes wouldn’t be too high to crash downloaders' game's. Basically a quality control before it would affect anyone else’s games
This particular mesh happened to be this flower stand, a very pretty one actually! (
Click me to see the flowerstand! ) at first thought, you might have gone “10664 faces 13132 vertex?? That’s a lot!!” Which initially was my first thought too when I saw it, but the reason why I did was because I only looked at what would be reasonable for the stand without the flowers in them. Obviously then it would be a tad too high, but then I remembered this project I did that I never released. Now if we concentrate on the flower-y bits you can see quite clearly that every single leave is done with a plane, which really is the only way to make good-looking flowers. For a mesh like this it sounds logical for it to be high in polycount!
(
Source: http://animium.com/2015/11/flower-3d-model)
I do have a few other examples but I think this by itself is a really good one! Especially since at first thought you’d think it’s far too high but really it’s just… well, perfectly fine.
So what did we look at here:- The way it has been meshed
- The shapes (so what we just learnt, roundish meshes are usually a bit higher in polys than block-y meshes)
- Whether it sounds reasonable the way it has been meshed.
When it comes to these sorts of meshes, you might need a basic understanding of meshing, though it’s perfectly doable to guess what is supposedly high and what isn’t. I will leave a few examples though:
As you can see, the tv takes the cube shape in itself, although the shape of the screen is a tad curvy, but overall it’s, well, cube-y! Now if you focus on the tv itself, you can see that the extra vertices added to it is, well, unnecessary. It doesn’t add much value to the shape in this case, so we know that the left version is super high in polycount, and thus, can cause lag, crashing, etc.
Pen holders are by itself usually roundish, so we know this takes over the same kind of shape as a sphere! Therefore, it’s understandable that this holder will be a tad higher. However, most modelers know “The more vertices, the smoother the holder looks!” Now, yes, this is true, but there should be a limit. The right version of the cup shows that, despite the left one looking pretty and smooth, that the right might not look as curvy but still looking great! If we were to going to add the left version of this cup into our games, it will cause lag and crashing.
Note: Keep in mind that the bigger the item, the more visible it would be that the item is a bit block-y looking around the curves, so it would make sense that a rounded trash can would be a tad (so not by much) higher than a pen holder