Hi, this is my first post so if I did something wrong with the category etc. please tell me
Anyway, I’m making a blender character, and it’s 1400 faces. How many faces is “Safe” for a blender character? I’m not using a supercomputer, I’m using a 7 year old mac. But luckily I’m not going for those
uncanny ultrarealistc characters. Any idea though, how many triangles/faces is safe for a character
on a computer this old?
You should have no problems up to go some hundreds of thousands of faces.
You can make a quick try by adding subsurf modifier to your model an check out how much you can increase the resolution before it starts to lag.
Welcome to BA 
Yes, you can go up to hundreds of thousands (or millions) of faces in Blender, but that doesn’t mean you can do so on your specific computer
Without knowing your computer, you’re the only one that can know how many faces are safe. Once you start lagging, you’ve found your limit 
Adding a subdiv modifier like @rigoletto is a great idea- a couple caveats, you’ll want to save first, and be extremely cautious with how you go. You never need to go higher than 5 levels of subdivision.
With 1400 starting faces, your levels of subdiv will have N faces:
1400
5600
22400
89600
358400
1433600
Taking you to a million and a half faces at level 5. If your computer can handle a level 5 modifier, nice! Otherwise, it’ll crash and you’ll have a decent idea of your upper limit- 1 million - 1.5 million faces
Actually in blender it can support millions of faces without lagging, it lags when i bring it into unity.
Lol so I’ve tried importing a cone with 137000 faces and it’s a little laggy. I’ll probably avoid passing 3000 faces for the character. Thanks!
Game engines handle high poly count very differently from Blender. Most games have polygon budgets, and while UE5 promises that with their new technology, no one will ever have to optimize polygons again, I’m dubious 
You’ll want to optimize your meshes for game engines for sure
My laptop is about that old and I’ve found that any more than 100,000 verts and Blender starts to dislike it a bit. As has already been stated though, game engines will handle things differently. I think your limit of 3000 should be totally fine for most devices.
The number of faces mostly has to do with memory, not CPU/GPU load. Modern operating systems support the idea of “virtual memory” which uses the hard drive as overflow. Data is “swapped in” and “swapped out” on demand. But if you start making heavy use of that – which a large number of faces can definitely do – you start paying a big price in performance which is actually being caused by disk reads and writes. (An SSD drive has consistently better performance, but there is still a price.)
Virtual memory relies on so-called “locality of reference,” which says that the next memory request is likely to be “nearby to” the last one, and the total so-called “working set” of now-active memory is a comparatively small subset of the total virtual memory space, although it changes constantly. Well, rendering throws that assumption right out the window: the “working set” is extremely large as the renderer bounces all over the internal data structures, which are large. You need the whole structure to be in “real RAM,” all the time. Virtual memory is not your friend when you are rendering.
In the extreme, your computer will start “thrashing,” which means that time spent performing disk I/O overwhelms everything else. When that happens, system performance degrades exponentially: it grinds to a halt, spinning its wheels. We call it “hitting the wall,” because it happens all at once. A performance curve that had been mostly-linear suddenly turns straight up.
Subdivide your meshes when and where it actually matters: where a lot of detail is needed on something important to the shot that is close to the camera, and which will be on-screen long enough for the audience to take a good look at it. (And if one side will never be seen, it doesn’t even need to exist: don’t waste time “culling.”) In the days when physical models were used in television and camera work, several different versions of each important model were made, with the highly detailed ones being used only in close-up shots. Once you’d had a good look at the detailed model, you would “see” the same details in the other ones even if they were not actually there.
Indeed, I am really hyped for UE5, Lumen, not having to bake ever again, and all that. But someone should really tell my rig as well, not to stress 
so, the idea is nice, and will hopefully be accessible for many, but as long as hardware is a limitation, I think we will keep tweaking and baking at least for a while.
I feel like people get a little crazy with the triangles and faces.
For an example, I just made 3 vases. The first one is made with
a cube extruded a few times. I made a hole in the top, solidified it and smoothed it. Only 17 faces.
The second one is the same as the first but its done with an 8 face cylinder. 68 faces.
The third one is made with a 2d outline and used a screw modifier, making it 288 faces.
All 3 of them look almost identical. An extreme number of faces is absolutely unnecessary.
UE5? Do you mean unreal engine 5? I don’t use that I use unity.
Yeah, you can go a bit insane with face counts. Sometimes, it’s necessary to have more detail but games generally don’t need very much.