wedge123 0 Posted December 28, 2013 Hi Could anyone give me a factual answer regarding the recommended limits for polys / verts. My main line of work is in architecture and am more interested in limits for buildings rather than weapons or vehicles. Am however interested in foliage and trees ect..... Any help on this would be great as I wouldn't want to create something that could have been further optimized. Also about textures... I last properly modeled for arma1 and things have changed a bit since then. What is recommended now for texture size 1024,2048 or does arma3 go any higher. Many thanks in advance Wedge Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
Richards.D 761 Posted December 30, 2013 Hello: I also love doing architecture, and have a few structures in game. When I did Arma 2 buildings I tried not going over 20k. As far as textures, you can do 2048x2048 without issue. Trees would be an issue, as that would seriously take up poly's quickly I would imagine. When I do massive buildings I run into the physical size limit. You can build something huge, but after a certain size the Geometry LOD will no longer function and be cut off at the size limit. But I've built massive 2 story structures with tons of rooms, so you can certainly be aggressive with size. Hope this helps. I hope you release a few when you get em in game as well! Arma 3 needs more professional architects! Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
PuFu 4591 Posted December 30, 2013 There is no simple answer to your question. I have previously explained this a number of times, and although this has NOT been confirmed by BI either way, my own tests seem to confirm it The simpler version is the limit is given by the number of faces / triangles, but more importantly the way those triangles share their vertices normals, or in other words, the amount of smoothing groups out there. In theory, a geosphere with one single smooth group could have 2^15 faces. In practice, no one, especially for hard surfaced objects (buildings, weapons, vehicles), so all minus characters and (maybe) foliage, there is no such thing. There is no real recommendation for polycount. If you ask me, the limit is there for legacy reasons, especially since nowadays CPUs and GFX cards can handle a lot more draw calls than they used to back in the day. That being said, there are other things that are more important, like what oxygen calls "sections" One model can have a minimum of 2 sections: 1 for the diffuse texture, and one of the material (.RVmat). I won't go sideways talking about weird reason behind the diffuse/color texture not being handled by the material/shader because it is besides the point. What i am trying to say is that for a HDD hungry engine like RV, it is of utmost importance to keep the number of files it reads from hdd to a minimum (in fact, my own opinion is that it is better to have 1 single 4096 texture instead of 4x 2048 - or 2 for that matter). Textures can be 512x512 / 512x1024 / 1024x1024 and so on and so forth up to 4096. Further reading: http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?120471-Model-Requirements-for-ArmA3&p=1950430&viewfull=1#post1950430 http://forums.bistudio.com/showthread.php?113249-Improvements-I-believe-a-decent-number-wants&p=1847181&viewfull=1#post1847181 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites
