Time to loose some poly's.....

After experimenting with Z-Brush and XNormal i decided to look at my model again and see if i could lower my poly count down to my original budget that i had decided upon at the beginning of the year with Stas and Dean. My budget for the character model was 10,000 polys or 20,000 tris.

After adding all the new added straps and extra detail i had well over stepped this budget and my character was now standing at a whopping 12,0019 ploys or 23.674 tris. I was not happy about this and i don't believe it is good practice to over shoot by so many. In what experience i have i do know that poly budgets are a big issue in the industry and these poly budgets must be obeyed.

So i looked long and hard at my model and started chipping into it using target weld and deleting any polys that i felt were of no use or did not have a purpose or did anything to the silhouette in any way. After a couple of hours of refinement i was alot happier with the model as now i came below my agreed poly budget. Also i believe that my actual geometry looks alot better now and a hell of alot cleaner as some of my model still looked messy.

Below is exactly how many polys i was able to save which I'm very pleased about:

• Old Mesh = 12,0019 polys or 23,674 tris


• New Mesh = 9,904 polys or 11,099 tris

I think i should point out that i could probably could look even deeper into getting the poly count down even further but with time ticking i am happy to move on from this stage. I also think with getting my poly count down it will also help my model run smoother in UT3.

If we look at the two images below there doesn't seem to be much loss of detail either between the two models can you tell which one is which?

And the answer is ..................................................................................................................................................................................................................................

the new lower poly model is on the left with the higher poly mesh on the right. So as we can see there isn't a great difference in to two meshes at all.