Hello. I’m looking to develop a game on Unreal Engine 4, using Blender to model most meshes. Since triangle budgets differ from game to game, I’ll give you all the details I can.
-PC platform.
-The game will be online multiplayer. Think 16 to 32 player servers in the final product.
-It will be a shooter, and the views will switch contextually between first person and third.
-There will be bullet physics (drop, velocity, etc.)
-Large maps. Not anything on the level of games like GTAV, but perhaps the size of a Battlefield map.
-Infantry based (no vehicles or anything fancy for now).
I hope to allow my game to clock 60 fps on mid-level PCs. My main concern is that the game performance be consistent and stable, and I’m willing to sacrifice detail in models and textures. However, I would like to get as much detail as possible under these parameters, so I’m looking to get a rough estimate of a tri budget on guns and characters. Also, if there is a one-size-fits-all rule of thumb for this sort of thing it would be much appreciated.
you don’t have to sacrifice detail. you can bake the normals of a high poly object onto a low poly facsimile using render baking aka normal baking. In order to do this you just need to know UV mapping / unwrapping, and the baking part is pretty simple.
I wouldn’t use Blender to bake normals, atleast not just yet. Try using a Blender to XNormal pipeline.
As for the UV unwrapping I would suggest using an adept program such as Headus UVLayout which is fair bit more powerful than Blender’s own internal unwrapping system.
I’ll parrot what everyone else said about normals! makes things easy.
im not too familiar with unreal, but i believe you’ll be coding in C++ for that, which gives you a bit more performance overhead (albeit increased complexity!) the rule of thumb i try to stick to is between 5,000 and 20,000 tris for a player character. the fewer you can get away with while still maintaining a manifold mesh, the better! you can usually have between 2 - 4 million tris on screen and not dip below 65-70 fps on a decent machine. the more important thing for modern graphics cards is texture drawcalls. Atlas as much as you can onto single images so that you have to push less data down the graphics bus with each cpu cycle. if you have a rudimentary understanding of UV mapping, you can do this manually as you make assets, if not, there are programs out there that can take several textures and stitch them together for you while still maintaining the UV coordinates.
if unreal lets you thread, (use more than one CPU core) DO THAT! and you shouldn’t have any issues with performance if you got a good programmer. thats my main complaint about Unity is the hoops we have to jump through to do any sort of threading (unityengine.dll is not threadsafe :().
