Creating A 3D environment and Polygon count

Since I have finished with my skilling on Maya I can now start to create an environment and a Character all in 3D.
Before we rush in to Maya and start modeling we have to draw my environment in photo shop and do some research. I really wanted to create A sci-fi environment thats set in the future. looking at films such as 5th Element and looking at TV shows such as Futurama. It was basically hover cars and tall building and I wonted to create some unique so I started to think up and idea of a city underground. I did some research and started to look at caves and look at how they form.

I wont my underground city to have a light source so I looked at pictures of caves that have light in some way or another. The red and blue scribbles on the research pictures indicate the dark areas of the cave and the light areas. This will be really good to model as it could show of my lighting skills on maya.

Once I decide how my cave was going to look like I stared adding buildings in to the rock and adding a bean of light coming in to the cave.
here is a ruff sketch of my idea:

I wonted to make it look as thought people could live very happily in a cave so I added water and the trees and plants. The plants only grow in the sunlight which I tried to show in my drawing. To improve this sketch I will add more buildings and then I will start to add colour to it.

Looking at this know you may think it looks too much to model it all. I need to model the rocks and houses and that will take time and i need to make sure it looks right. To save time I came up with the idea of doing a matte painting and importing it in to maya, I wont be painting it all, just the background. This is the same technique they use in Lord of the Rings, where they model half and the rest is a painting. This also gives me a chance to improve my photo shop skills. It will be great to see how this will turn out.

Polygon Count

In this blog I also want to talk about Polygon count. Polygon count is very important when it comes to modeling as most companies will give you a limit on how many polygons you are allowed. In my proposal I said I want to create a game environment so I must do some research in to how many polygons are used in a game environment. I think this is the perfect time to start looking in to polygon count as this might effect how much detail I can put in to my environment.

Since I am doing more of a game environment rather than a film environment I will have less polygons to work with. when they create a 3D film they try a go for a very realistic look and they have so much money to spend on time to create a realistic look. on the other hand when you look at games now they try to make them as realistic as possible but the game has to run off an engine which can limit the detail so the polygon count will be slightly lower due to this engine. This may be the case now but when the technology gets better, the graphics will get better allowing game company's to have a larger polygon count.

here is a list of games and the characters in the games and how many polygons are used to make these characters.

  Gears of War, Xbox 360, 2006
Wretch - 10,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Boomer - 11,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps
Marcus - 15,000 polygons with diffuse, specular and normal maps

GTA San Andreas, PS2, 2004 
Characters - 2,000 polygons with 1 256×256 8bit texture
NPCs - 1,200 polygons with 1 256×128 8bit texture
Gant bridge - 16,000 polygons, includes LOD

Halflife 2, PC, 2004 
Alyx Vance - 8323 polygons
Barney - 5922 polygons
Combine Soldier - 4682 polygons
Classic Headcrab - 1690 polygons
SMG - 2854 polygons (with arms)
Pistol - 2268 polygons (with arms)

Halo, Xbox, 2001 
Masterchief - 2,000 polygons

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, Gamecube, 2005 (Small mistake here, it's not on GC but PS2)
Snake - 4,000 polygons

Resident Evil 4, Gamecube, 2005 
Leon - 10,000 polygons

Jak & Daxter, PS2, 2001
Jak - 4000 polygons

for more information:  http://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=126802

as you can see by looking at the numbers the later the game the lower the polygons. The polygons are really low in Halo only using 2,000 polygons but if you look at Resident Evil's Leon they use 10,000 polygons for his character. There is only a year between the two games yet the numbers of polygons are very different.

looking at a game environment the polygons a very high.

Lair, PS3, 2007
Main dragon plus its rider - 150,000 polygons
16x16KM scene - 134M polygons (streamed into memory, not loaded at run time)

 Project Gotham Racing 3, X360, 2005
Cars - 80,000-100,000 polygons (interior + exterior), damages add between 10,000 and 20,000 more polygons per car
Brooklyn Bridge - 600,000 polygons (LOD might be included)
Manhattan Bridge - 1 million polygons (LOD might be included)


http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=43975


Looking at these figures shows you just how much detail are in these games. The Manhattan bridge in the Gotham racing game is 1 million polygons alone.


In conclusion looking at these figures I should think about trying to create my character will less polygons as possible or keep the polygons between 10,000 - 20,000 as that what characters are ruffly today. for the environment its a complete guess as they range depending on the game they are making but I would say around 600,000 or more polygons would be needed to make my enviroment. I really need to be thinking about how i will texture the enviroment so that is something to think about when i model.


In my next blog I will be showing my progress on my cave!
thanks for reading
x