New to Blender - What is low poly?

Hey everyone! I am new to 3D modeling, started 1-2 days ago; coming from coding primarily and I am a little confused on what exactly low poly is. I am still making a buster blade type weapon (image included) and I am still adding to it, it already has 20,088 faces and 37,680 tris, is this a lot? Is this considered low poly? I also plan to be hand painting all models I make.


Low poly is a comparative term to indicate polygon count compared to another version of it, or other models made for the same purpose.

Low poly is also a style term and it’s not apparent if that is also related to the question.

For what you’re showing it sounds high but without knowing the above, seeing the geometry, the working stage the model is in, can’t say if it’s too high, where it’s too much, and if something should be done to fix that.

Well, I am thinking of deleting faces and etc for parts that are not seen by the player to reduce the count,. especially on the UV Spheres acting as like bolts on the blade portion…Think that would help?

As a rule of thumb, low poly tends to have faces that number in the tens, maybe hundreds and could be a thousand. But in general not much higher than that.

Those don’t define a silhouette so those could be done as a bump or a normal map. Bump often needs a higher bit depth image, at least 16bit, grayscale. Normal map uses all image channels to store the surface direction difference, color.

I think the decimate modifier allows you to remove some of the faces that are not needed (i.e. ones on a flat plane that don’t alter geometry) so may come in useful if you are reducing polygons.

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Decimate also has a feature to decimate and preserve UV islands, I use that and UnSubDiv on it the most.

But Igatios I would most likely look at retopology in your case right now and leave that beautiful highpoly mesh you have intact.