Previously, I’ve explained that it is very difficult to answer the question “How many polygons should I be using in a character/vehicle/environment?” This doesn’t stop the question being asked however, so I thought I’d approach it in a different way – how many polygons have other games used?

By listing the game, the hardware it runs on, and any art information I could find, I hope that this will be a good starting point as to suitable polygon counts and texture sizes. Ideally I’d like to list as many games as possible, from different genres and platforms.

This is very much a work in progress, and if you haven’t read my previous thoughts on the “How many polygons?”, I suggest you do check it out.

So, I’ll warn casual readers again – the number of polygons used don’t matter if they are not used well. This is simply a technical markerpost to try and identify what certain games used on certain hardware at a certain time. Supposedly Halo 2 used less polygons for Masterchief than Halo 1, and I’ve heard that Call of Duty 4 used less polygons for the character models that CoD2 did – I suspect this will due to relying more heavily on normal mapping to create the details.

Dead or Alive series, Xbox, 2001-2004

Character – ~10,000-15,000

Gears of War, Xbox 360, 2006 (according to D’Artiste book)

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

GTA IV, Xbox 360/PS3, 2008

Story Characters – 8-10,000 polygons with multiple 256×256/512×512 diffuse, specular and normal maps

NPCs – 3-4,000 polygons with multiple textures

Half-Life, PC, 1998

Zombie – 844 polygons

High Definition pack Zombie- 1700 polygons

Halflife 2, PC, 2004

Alyx Vance – 8323 polygons

Barney – 5922 polygons

Combine Soldier – 4682 polygons

Buggy (without mounted gun) – 5824 polygons

Classic Headcrab – 1690 polygons

SMG – 2854 polygons (with arms)

Pistol – 2268 polygons (with arms)

Halo, Xbox, 2001

Masterchief – 2,000 polygons

The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, GC, 2002

Link – 2800 polygons

The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, GC/Wii, 2006

Link – 6900 polygons

Lost planet, X360/PC, 2007

Wayne – 12392 polygons (but finally 17765 polygons for compatibility with motion blur effect)

VS robot – 30-40,000 polygons

Background – ~500,000 polygons

Mass Effect, X360, 2007

Sheppard + armor + weapons – ~20,000-25,000 polygons

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, PS2, 2005

Snake – 4,000 polygons

Project Gotham Racing 2, Xbox, 2003

Vehicles – 10,000 polygons

Project Gotham Racing 3, Xbox 360, 2006

Vehicles – 80,000-100,000 polygons

Quake, PC, 1996

200 polygons with 1 320×200 8bit texture using predefined palette.

Quake 4, PC, 2006

Player model – 2,500 polygons with multiple diffuse, specular and normal maps

Resident Evil 4, Gamecube, 2005

Leon – 10,000 polygons

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, PS3, 2007

Main characters – ~20,000-30,000 polygons

Drake – ~30,000 polygons

Pirates – ~12,000-15,000 polygons

Unreal Tournament, PC, 1999

Player model – 800 polygons

Unreal Tournament 2k3, PC, 2003

Player model – 3,000 polygons

Unreal Tournament 3, PC, 2007

Weapon models – 4,500 to 12,000 triangles for the first person view

Virtua Fighter 5, Arcade/PS3/X360, 2006

Character – ~40,000 with diffuse, specular and normal maps

Background – 100,000 – 300,000 polygons

Please feel free to add QUALIFIED information in the comments, or drop me an email with information that you think deserves to be here..

Technorati Tags: polycount, how many polygons

I’ve been meaning for a while to recommend books on RSArt – books that I own personally or have at work, books that I think are useful to games artists. Since I am predominantly a character artist, I suspect that most of the books I own and thus recommend will be character based too.

I’ll start by recommending Stop Staring by Jason Osipa. Stop Staring, whilst targeted towards Maya users, is an incredibly useful book for learning good facial topology no matter what package you use. It explains how expressions are constructed, and covers important aspects in facial animation such as what you should leave OUT of an animation, as well as what you need to actually animate.

This book however is not for total beginners (although I’m sure that you’d still learn something useful). However if you have some limited knowledge and want to improve your understanding of facial animation, then I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Technorati Tags: facial animation, jason osipa, stop staring

As an artist working with a team of others in the games industry, you will no doubt be using a content management system, and one of the most common in the market today for artists is Alienbrain by Avid/SoftImage.

Alienbrain is very powerful system, but for a new artist it can be a daunting application. The purpose of this post is to break it down to the core elements, the information that you’ll want to know on your first day at work when you’re confronted with it for the first time. To be perfectly honest, it may well be enough information for most artists for the majority of the time they use it.

What is it?
In many respects Alienbrain is like a version of Windows Explorer with added file protection/sharing/backup functionality. It allows users to share a file, but prevents several people from editing a file at the same time. It’s a content management system that backs up everything you choose from your hard disk to a central server. Alienbrain also stores a copy of every change to a file when you save a file, or “Check In”, to Alienbrain.

This means several things – since the files are stored on a central server, any artist on your team can edit art assets created by any other user. A server copy of each file means that a local hard disk failure doesn’t mean the loss of days or even months of work. Since the server makes backup copies of every file when it is saved to the server, any change is reversible.

Common Actions
There are only a few core actions – Import, Check Out, Check In and Get Latest.

• Importing a file is what happens when you first add a file that exists on your hard disk to Alienbrain. From that point the file exists in two places, a master server copy and a local copy on your hard disk, and both are write protected
• When you wish to make changes to a file, you must perform a Check Out – you find the file in Alienbrain and give yourself write access to it. At this stage your computer will copy the latest version from the server to your hard disk.
• When you have finished working with a file, you will perform a Check In – this copies your changes to the server, making an invisible backup of the previous version, and makes the file read-only again.
• Get Latest does exactly as you’d expect – it gets the latest version of the file from the server. On larger projects there may be several of you working a single asset, so as one person is rigging a model, another person may be editing textures. When you come to export the file, you’ll want to make sure you have all the current resources.

What do the icons mean?
Alienbrain marks all files with an icon so that you tell the status of a file at a glance. I’ve pulled together an image with the 7 most common (there are a few others), and I’ll explain what they mean.

• my_file_01.tga has a little disk icon on it, which means that it is a local copy and doesn’t exist on the server. This file needs to be imported
• my_file_02.tga is the standard icon for an imported file that no-one is currently editing.
• my_file_03.tga has a little red tick – this means that you have checked this file out for editing, but haven’t modified it
• my_file_04.tga also has a little red tick, but the entire document icon is red. In this instance you’ve checked the file out, and you’ve made changes. This is Alienbrains way of telling you that you’ve not committed these changes, and that you need to perform a Check In
• my_file_05.tga is ghosted – this is a file that exists on the server, but you don’t have a local copy of. A Get Latest will copy the file to your computer
• my_file_06.tga has a black tick, which means that some other user has checked this file out for edits. You can’t edit this file (but can view it)
• my_file_07.tga is half and half – you have a old copy of this file, someone else has edited it and checked a new version into the server.

Hopefully this brief overview will give new artist an anchor point on their first few days in a job. Although it is Alienbrain specific, the basic principles are the same in many version control systems.

Technorati Tags: alien brain, alienbrain, gafb, game industry, technical information

I’ve created a new section on the wiki for games industry technical notes. Feel free to edit!

Technorati Tags: game industry, technical information, specular maps

“Should I got to university, or take the time to teach myself game art?”

Self teaching is great – it shows a company that you had the skills to pick up something by yourself, showing initiative. You’ll be able to learn exactly what you want in a timeframe that suits you.

Having a degree is superb because as well helping to protect your future, it will show a prospective company that you were able to complete a series of tasks and deadlines set by others – and to an ability level good enough to get awarded a degree. These days however there are very few courses that teach you exactly what you need to know to get a job. The courses are becoming more relevant, but university courses have to cater for a wide range of possible career choices, so they don’t seem to offer a direct path to a job making games.

So you could do both – go to university, get a degree in SOMETHING, and teach yourself art at the same time.

As a games artist you are trying to make things look as good as you can with as little impact as possible on the computing time needed to draw them. Computers and consoles only have a finite amount of computational time in their CPU (Central Processing Unit) or GPU (Graphics Processing Unit).

When developing a game, the framerate is the performance measuring stick, where 1 frame is equal to the time taken to process everything. In each frame the computer or console must figure out exactly what is going on, where it is happening, what can be seen and what can be heard, then draw what needs to be seen and play the correct sound. The more things the CPU needs to do in a frame means the frame will take longer to complete.

The faster a frame can be processed, the better a game will look and sound. When you see a game running at 3-5 frames per second (fps), it looks awful – it stutters. You can often notice this happening in some racing games – at the first corner in the race before the pack is split up the console is having to compute and draw 20 cars – that’s a lot of data. It can be likened to looking at the world through a strobe light. It is generally unacceptable for games to run at any less than around 25 frames per second. With faster paced games, especially reaction based games such as First Person Shooters (also shortened to FPS, but uppercase), it is important to have even higher framerates. PC gamers often tweak their systems to eek every last framerate boost to give them that edge over their opponents.

So where does all this leave us as artists? Well, we need to make our work as efficient as possible. Sure, a highly detailed model with dozens of large highly detailed textures will look wonderful, but if the hardware can only display that one model on screen, with nothing else – no AI, no sound – then the game will not be much fun, will it? It won’t be some much a game, more of a picture. At the end of the day, you are there to make art for a game, not a game to display your art.

There are 2 hard and fast rules to remember when it comes to helping the framerate:

• Keep your polygon counts lower
• Keep your texture smalls.

One of the most important aspects of working with games is to remember that the end result is a game, not simply a collection of art and sound and code. Since this is important, it sounds like a great place to start the book.

“Of course the end result is a game!” I hear you cry. While it sounds like a simple premise, it is one that is all too easily forgotten. As an artist, your job is to make art for the game, and the game is more important than your work.

I have met more than one person in my career who put the work they had done before the game. These people were convinced that their work (whether art, sound, design, code or other) was perfect and that it should be used exactly as it was with no changes.

It might seem like a cliché, but these days a game is a team effort, and people need to be flexible. You might produce the best piece or work in your entire career, but if it doesn’t fit the game, it will need to be changed.

Not only that, but your artwork is there as a part of the game, to complement the other art, the sound, the AI, the gameplay, held together by magic code glue. You art has to fit into memory with all those other things, so while you might complain about the specs you have been given, the chances are that they were given for a reason.

As an aside, I was once in the situation where a terrible piece of game code had been written, and when several people protested we were told that since it had been written, it was going in – otherwise it would have been a waste of the programmers time.

This was only a few days after several of my completed characters were cut from the game because the story had changed.

Inspired by a thread on Polycount about being an organised artist, I decided to post my tips there and here.

If you have any other suggestions on how I could become more organized and efficient in producing cg work, I would be much obliged.

Some general art tips:

• I use a folder of shortcuts (as posted here before): Windows shortcuts speed up your workflow
• At work I do a lot of rigging/skinning. I’m always dropping animations onto skeletons to test them, and by default 3dsmax looks in it’s own Animation folder. Therefore in that folder I have a shortcut to our exported animation folder on the network – this stops me browsing for it each time.
• I use Alienbrain a lot to prevent me having multiple versions of a file lying around with slightly different names.
• In Photoshop, if I’m using only a few layers, like using a PSD file simply as a container to store a diffuse, spec and normal map for the same object, I’ll have empty layers between each of those, named SPACER and turned off. It helps me separate each section, and prevents me accidentally collapsing them onto each other.
• With a busy PSD, I’ll make use of folders – example: if I have several diffuse textures for the same object with dirt layers, then each of those gets its own folder, jumper1, jumper2. Each of those has sub folders dirt, rips etc.
• Map your photshop filters to hotkeys! FILTERS?!!!!YUCK!!!!11. No, this is really clever. Alt-F5 is Unsharp mask, Alt-F6 is Gaussian Blur, Alt-F7 is Highpass (a VITAL filter)
• Never name a file temp.xxx if you plan on keeping it.
• Likewise, NEVER name a file latest.xxx

A few other computer workflow tips:

• Sort your internet bookmarks into folders, such as Music, Money, Art, Games. Sort these with subfolders where applicable.
• Delete emails as you get them/deal with them, or move them to a folder. At home I usually have 0 emails in my inbox – they are either deleted or stored in folders such as Friends, Holiday, Registration Information. If you do need to find an email later, use your packages SEARCH function.
• Use an RSS reader to get your dose of news. I prefer to use Google Reader, I used to use bloglines. A web based reader allows me to read the same feeds at home or work. I’m subscribed to BBC news, Eurogamer, Lifehacker, Warren Ellis, lots of friends sites, some Polycounters sites, Boing Boing, Penny arcade etc. Like everything else, I’ve organised these into sections – Computing, Art, Friends, Music, News etc.
• Use your feed reader to subscribe to digital photograpy technique sites – thats where you pick up invaluable tips such as colouring grayscale images with duotones and tritone. I learned the orton effect there, which is superb for concept art. I learned that you often get a better sharpen with less artifacts if you do it in LAB mode…