Numbers of Tris

Support Modeling
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Good morning,

I was playing around with my material study and displacement mapping. I had to subdivide the terrain quite a bit to get what I wanted. The simple scene looks like it has around 530,000 tris. My PC doesn’t seem to have a problem with it with Eevee in Rendered Mode.

I’m on a decent consumer system - nothing someone at a major movie or game studio would find appealing, but good enough for learning and maybe some small things that I can sell down the line. It’s a newer Ryzen 7 with a 2060 RTX. My main bottleneck is RAM which I’ll fix up nicely in a few weeks.

I know that the answer to the question, “how many polygons should my scene have?” is always “the minimum amount required to pull off whatever visual illusion you’re trying to pull off”, but I was wondering if anyone had any other insights they could share. Like, if I were to wrap a Blender scene in a neat little package and put a bow on it and send it to an average Blender user, would a scene with a million tris be really excessive? Two million? Five million?

Also, I’m sure I’ll get used to this PC and through trial and error I’ll learn, but does anyone wiser have an idea of how many tris I could make a terrain before the whole thing bogs down so much that I’ll wish I hadn’t done that last subdivide?

On another note, if you look at the old Final Fantasy 7 game for the Playstation 1, you’ll notice that the characters have what seems like 50 polygons each, (I don’t know the actual number). So, if we’re working in a low poly sort of way to get that effect, how many polys would I be looking at? And how many polys does something like Gollum from the LOTR movies have?

Again, I know that the answers for stuff like this vary according to equipment, audience, etc. And I know enough not to make something dense if it doesn’t need to be, but I’m just trying to get to know the numbers involved in these sorts of things - I can experiment but it also helps me to talk things through.

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Polys in the Scene are very memory intensive. Your 2060 should handle quiet a lot of tasks.
Im not certainly sure what budgets you refering to, as game assets, vfx and animation have different needs. For me personally, i don’t care on the count in my viewport. When sculpting, i keep going as long as the viewport does not start to lag.

Whenever there is a need for polycounts, you will be told. There is also a extensive list on some poly budgets @ Polycount

For your terrain i recommend a plane with just the “BIG” parts sculpted a bit (Mountain or Hill shapes). 2k Polys can do a good job there. After that, try to deal with adaptive subdivisions along with a normal and displacement map for medium and small details.

You will like to focus more on topology and non-destructive methods, as it will help to create content that need a minimum of polys to reach the desired result and budgets. As an example, Open Subdiv with creases, Adaptive Subdivisions from heightmaps, Vector Displacements or Kitbash / Decal Mapping.

A little vid on how Blender scales with memory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z2mLqlxcfUk

Artstation is also good ressource, specially with Sketchfab integrations, that often show what topology looks when good maps are created.

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Yep. That’s it. All of that. :slight_smile: I’m just wondering what canny poly budgets were for various different output intents.

Your link at Polycount was just what I was looking for to help me to understand how many polys are in characters in modern games. Excellent reference. If anyone has any more insights or links like that, I’m all ears.

Subdividing only the parts of the mesh that need subdividing is an art in and of itself and I’m sure that I’ll get the hang of it as this year continues.