Warlock279 posted at 11:27AM Wed, 29 April 2020 - #4386449

EClark1894 posted at 4:13PM Thu, 16 April 2020 - #4386429

I already have several individual prop items for this set, but as I'm trying to fill up these shelves AND keep the poly count down, you just haven't seen them.

More wouldn't radically impact your scene. You'd be looking at 100 items for 600 polygons [1200 tris], and over 200 for 2500 triangles. That's nothing to modern computers, even a game engine running in real-time would hardly take notice of that. Your bigger risk is likely texture memory, the more textures you have the more ram you're using for textures.

If you wanted to save some texture memory on the individual items, you could "float" the polygons on your existing texture sheet for that item. That would cost you a few more verts, but again, nigh meaningless at the counts we're talking, and it saves you the texture space.

If you wanted to shave some polygons on the milk case. you could use a sloped shelf. With the slope you'd only need individual cartons for the first, maybe, two rows of the case, after which you could switch to a single block like you're using for the cereal shelves; barring an unusually low shot designed intentionally to expose the cheat, you'd never be able to see the tops of the stuff back there because of the slope and the shelf above.

This is a very interesting point, and very true. Textures are one of the biggest killers to resources, especially GPU rendering. Most of the time geometry isn't much of a concern by comparison. I think this is from years and years of learning the opposite mode of thinking in the gaming community that we have always been taught to lower poly count rather than worry about texture sizes. This was true when CPU rendering was the driving force behind most rendering engines, but now that GPU has taken over and CPU power has increased exponentially, the real concern is limited VRAM and "draw calls" to the GPU.

Triangles from a mesh are sent to the GPU as a draw call each time a new piece of geometry is encountered in the scene. It is much faster for a GPU to transfer a million tris all at once than it is for the GPU to transfer 100 triangles 1000 times. Each draw call means the GPU has to stop, hold, and wait for the slower CPU to transfer scene information to it. This is time-consuming if you have 1000 draw calls happening in a scene. So it can actually be much better to have one object with many triangles than many small objects with fewer triangles of the same overall total when it comes to GPU rendering, and large image textures are usually the main limitation on lower-end cards.

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