Hi- I am working on a vehicle prop, and I was wondering how many polygons were too many for the average poser user? Also, How many Polies does a standard poser figure have? How many polies before the eaverage user starts to slow down? If there are any people out there who make props for poser, and can share your experiences on this, it would really help. Thanks. Aharon

around 20 thousand I imagine is average

This is a huge issue with me. I have a PII266 with only 64meg ram. So high polygon counts really kill me. A 3meg. mesh is about the limit for my machine. And still be able to be productive with it. ScottA

I have a tbird 1 gig with 512 meg of ram and run some meshes with 80k polys...my machine does slow down noticable with this many polys. I routinely run 50k poly meshes with no slow down. 30 to 40k polys are ok in my experience with a 500 meg cpu and 128 meg of ram. Mike

You could also create 2 different versions. One with high resolution and the other low resolution. There is a program called progmesh on the web which has a shareware version that does reduction for .3ds objects up to 6000 faces. I hope this helps, Sam

What are you modeling in? If you are using Rhino, you can decimate effectively to create lower rez versions.

Building an efficient mesh is an acquired skill in 3D modeling. A high resolution model may not necessarily be better, it may just have more polygons. Its a case of putting the detail where its required and being wary of the surface quad divide tool. Also NURBS modeling is notorious for creating high density meshes.
A good rule of thumb is to have a poly count comparable to a similar Poser model. For example the P4 male is about 19,000 with an OBJ file size of 2 Mb
Also remember that a lot may be accomplished in the texture.

I'd say 30,000 is O.K., 45,000 is borderline, 60,000+ is too many for a lot of users today. Stay away from NURBs and you can build tighter models, as PhilC said!

http://www.paralelo.com.br/produtos/progmesh/progmesh.htm http://www.paralelo.com.br/download/download.htm

Thanks folks. You have all been very helpful. 3DS Max has a way of optimizing a model, but it can be unpredictable. I'll try the program you folks mentioned (thanks for the URL Jeff). Aharon

I've also found that it makes sense to design with the target in mind. For example, the base obj files of my dagger and my rapier each come in at less than 1mb. If you zoom in so that they're life-size on the screen, no amount of rendering tricks will make them look smooth, but they look just spiffy in the Dork's hand when he's rendered at six inches tall, 300dpi.

I've been doing what PhilC recommends, hand-building meshes and comparing my file-size for similar objects to the models and props shipped with Poser. I feel that as long as I'm under or near a similar object, I'm probably OK. My models have very comparable render times so far on mid-ranged laptops and desktops.