Ok i am a higher poly modeler mostly do to the fact that most people i make my models for are not effected by a 10,000 poly model ! I am definetly aware of the pros and cons of low and high poly modeling on the other hand ! My question is I have been seeing alot of people latley sacrifice good animation in the sake of having a low poly character with the power of new sytems i think alot of people are sticking to close to the old ways! pentium is due to have a 10 ghz processor by 2006, and the x box presently boast being able to comfortably handle characters with 8500 polys not bad (microsoft) in my opininon to get pretty decent realistic facial and hand animation you talking about at least 5- 800 polys unless you have a character that simply is not very detailed shrek had 78 lip controls theres no way you could have done that or reched that level of expression without alot of polys /nurbs The other thing alot of people that ive talked with dont realize the impact of low poly on your texture map this can be corrected but in uv mapping can cause really bad stretching I was talking about this with a frind gio and he pointed out that people are always looking at anotomy and poly count (comparing a low poly model with a high'er poly model saying that they could do the same thing with low poly but to a high poly junkie theres a world of differnce in the detail you see in them ) when alot of the time they ignore good detail work in the model itself probally cause we are both modelers and not animators anyone have any opinions ? nothing against low poly work just an observation

btw im not saying you cant get a good animation out of a stick man either ima saying what do you all consider when keeping poly count low are you doing it just to keep it low afraid of getting to high or are you doing it for another specific reason where do you distinguish what is improtant to you ?

Hi Travis. There are good reasons for both high and low poly counts. It all depends on what the final use is going to be. If you have the computer capability and are making something for broadcast, you can afford to and want to use high poly count for detail. PhilC is making characters to be used as avatars in the new Adobe online world thing, so they have to be low poly. If someone is using a "regular" computer to do animations or still images with many characters, low to mid poly count is going to be important to them to keep render time down. Another thing to consider is texture maps and the amount of memory they take.

hey trav, as u know im into low poly right now. i spent my entire modeler life looking for details no matter what and ended up with thousands of polys. no problem at all. i really enjoy the results and everything. but then i started to pay attention in other people works and in my own work and i could see a lot of unnecessary poly all over the mesh and i decided to try a low poly mesh, just to see if i could..and i did! i guess the ideal mesh is the one with details and lots of polys in the right place and where you can save polys..save them! thats why i try to avoid bandsaw, for example, and build poly by poly, paying attention where i can save extra polys... and there is the animation issue.. i have a p3 850 with 512 ram and a gforce2mx card and a high res model really slow things in a very annoing way. my guess in that in most cases a good number for a complete character is around 5.000 1.000 polys with a lot of details (wrinkles, clothes, props, etc.). about hte tex maps, ive been testing it and a great way to avoid stretching is to create all the base tex with procedurals uv maps (try iris, its a standalone app to create procedural tex) and then only fine detail with image maps(veins, lips bumps, etc)and a lot of gradient maps with incidence angle.. but im not sure of anything i said before!!! im still learning all that 3d stuff so my oppinion might change 30 minutes later. thats what i think right now:) see ya.

note: above, please read 5.000 - 10.000 polys as a good number of polys.

Loagan you are correct! I agree that having poly's only where you need them is a major importance and i agree for a standard detailed character, i think you hit the nail on the head saying around 5000 to 10000 my characters are around 5600 to 7000 with no close but that includes polys used for detailed eyelashes teeth gums etc hands and face tend to take up around 2000 so the body is usually only 3300 or so clothed they ususlay jump toaround 8700 with weopons clothes, however i have done some around 20,000 but theseare film res models where the body looks like the frozen state in lw all polys being equal in size Logan gave me the oprutunity to play with one of his models and i think that the lower poly work he has achieved surpasses people ive worked with so i wanted to syay good job to him! the reason i brought this topic up however is there seems to be alot of users that think high poly modeling is bad and that you should sacrifice detail for low poly without cause . one instance is people making models for digital sculpture if your not going to animate it but your looking for a detailed look go for it take the 20 minutes render time its going to take in the long run its worth it logan band saw is definetly one of lw's most powerful tools you can use it even if its only on one poly the way you do this is select the polys you want to slice and flip their normals, band saw will slice only these polys giving you all the control ! you will love it once you try theres virtually no stopping control of your mesh combined with merge and add point

Hrms... Well, I model mostly for fun and static images, but am working on a positively archaic machine (AMD K6II-366 with 64 MB RAM), so I tend to try to keep my critters -relatively- low poly... by that, I'm using the Poser figures as a base. My sea beast, for example, is about 16,000 polys. If I were to do him for a game, I would have changed the mesh settings for a lot lower polycount. But, then again, I'm just a hobbyist, what do I know... 8-P

I started out low-poly (game mods and a crappy machine) and then moved up to high-poly (trueSpace, Poser, and a less crappy machine). This learning experience has affected the way I model. I usually begin a project by roughing out a low-poly version of whatever I'm working on, then add details to the mesh as necessary. Travis makes a good point about the progression of technology. My current rig is 30 times more powerful than the one I started with a few years ago. The entire 3D software industry is moving to take advantage of this silicon muscle, from game development to high-end rendering packages. Low-poly won't remain low much longer. Just look at projects in the works at id Software (Doom 3) and Epic Games (Unreal 2) for examples. The level of geometric detail in these real-time 3D engines is approaching that of Poser 4.

I prefer low-poly modeling, not only because my current system isn't all that great, but it is also easier to work with low-poly models. It's still important to have the right amount in detail areas, but not just a bunch of polys all over.

I beg to differ with both LD and Trav. With the advent of nurbs, Low Poly modelling is becomming more the current trend of things. You can get as much detail using nurbs modeling a human than you can with a high poly model. The thing is technique. As we look at your wireframes Travis, your models are very dense from start to finish. Others on the other hand are dense only in the places where they are needed and less dense in the more smooth areas. This can cut your polycount by over 60%. As the hardware gets more powerful, well so are the effects. Add radiosity to a render of 1000000 polygons, then the pixel filler, and then textures on top of that you be waiting hours even on a 2 gig system. Then if it is an animation, well forget it! Not even productive. However, have someone design smart models using nurbs, and your can cut that time down. Even Phil Tippets studios have moved to low poly nurbs models because of the amount of detail at the reduced cost to bandwidth. Projects can be rendered faster and move a bit quicker, this also opens up room for more effects etc.... My system will handle high poly models, but I figure it is redundant. There also the equation of realism. Take a human model for instance. Humans are not as defined as the comic book characters. We only see that much definition on a real human when the environment is favorable. Take a body builder. They oil their skin and stand under a scheme of lights to make their muscles look much deep than they really are. Nowadays, people are getting more into the big picture. At that is what is all comes down to in the end. How to get to the end image is often neglected here at renderosity, But how to get there is the most important part of any production, because without how, you may never get to the end. I prefer to be subtle when modeling orgranics. It adds a touch of realism in my eyes. Travis, you are an extremely detailed modeler, but your polycount could be greatly reduced by altering your technique.

I agree about my models! everything ive posted here is way to high and sloppy but thats becuase i post works in progress, i have a redundant way of modeling where ill go back and forth sometimes which is why my pics here looks so high i go back and use pbo to merge out the areas that dont need detail in the end. I only end up with the polys where i need them. i dont recomend this method to anyone its just how i do it . ill post my head im working on now to show the way i do it it will look backwards to most start out pretty high poly and end up lower poly but still higher than alot of others I some what disagree about nurbs but in a way that kinda depends on what you consider nurbs talking with a feew people working with weta (lord of the rings ) and seeing harry potter to me and them it seems the industry is a t least getting into sub d polygon modeling and in some of the biggest movies which will have a huge impact on what is bieng used in the future I agree with what everyone has said basicly i was talking about not putting higher poly counts where you could use them not all over but in areas of importance around the eyes around the mout etc . i will clean up one of my models tyhat i can post i have a few that i really would like to show but have nda agremments so ill actually try to post some good work here for once LOL

btw thanks teph and everyone for posting you opinions they only help us all to keep an open mind and look at it from different perspectives which can only be good

This is a decent example I think. I could drop the count in this somewhat, but then i'd start to loose faetures in the chin, and small subtlies in areas where it would become to smoothed. There are areas like the forehad and neck which will be lowered but not alot, I feel that in order to get good facial animation that the poly 's I have are needed to make expresion smoothe swelling of the cheecks for the smile, frown, det wrinkeling of the forehead for eybrow shrugs. indeed they could be lowereb but not without having large difrences in poly size a 1 inch poly next to a 5 inch poly i d rather have it more even which also has a large impact on renders

hey eb. i think this low vs high poly is a very important discussion for learning purposes. it is important to know what people are doing and how they do and what they think about it. what i could learn from this thread is that there are times and places for low poly and high poly and in some meshes u can use high poly areas and low poly areas. this kind of question(low vs poly) reminds me the famous question: NURBS or POLYGONS and that one was answered this way: it depends of your project :) if all of us were using the same modelling approach, i tell you: it would be no fun at all :)

its improtant to not too that in alot of productions there are often several of the same model in higher and lower res versions I think the polys verses nurbs thing has alot to do with the modeler too! sometimes its just a matter of which is the easiest or most comfortable to use, they both have advantages and i think you can achieve mesurable results with each, though most of my friends that work at some of the biggers studios seem to think nurbs are dead (digital domain, imageworks some of the crew at nickelodean and the mill ) also a reason you see so many using in house software

I don't think that your models are sloppy Travis, think that your style is High Density. It may not be as processor efficient, but the models are good. The example you set there is good. I don't think you would loose any definition in reduction here. I think you could loose a great deal of polygons around the cheeks and chin. I think that what could kill the animation is the arrangement. It is unnatural around the eyes and it will show in your morphs. I have found that arrangement was more important that quantity when it comes to animation. for example: In this character, she has full phenomes and a very low number of polys around the face, but density increases around the ears and the eyes as they are conversion zones. A place where polygons seem to grow from. The eyes are absolutely circular in area just like real human musle eye arrangements as well as around the mouth. Because of this, when creating my endomporphs, I can get a great deal of flexibility without losing shape and with a lower number of polys as well.

Also around the mouth I might add. Of course, this is my personal style of modeling and you do things differently however good effects can be achieved with low poly models. Mind you the neck is not that defined but that was by choice. Circular around the eyes and mouth is an polygonal arrangment that must be adhered to or else you can catch hell during animation.

Attached Link: Http://www.btinternet.com/~jonathan.west3/images/tephtalk.avi

Here is a link to sample animation I did a while back. Mind you it is just a test but it was completed in lightwave using endomorphs and mixed in soundforge. The character is under a larger role right now but it is an example of what can be down with a low number of polys and less than 20 morphs. You need the divx codec to play and its about 2.1 megs big. Yep the voice is mine.

i try to keep as low poly as possable (433mhz) the hardest part i feel is textureing i use subdivision mostly this model i feel could be animated but i just like to model stuff animation and textureing i dont have mutch intrest in but it is a must have to make others like the work you are doing