I'm curious to find out what people in general thing is too high a poly count?  The reason I ask is that I create items in ZBrush and obviously those items can have extremely high poly count, but with ZBrush you can export lower poly versions and provide a displacement map for the texture (giving the appearance of a higher res model than it really is).  Do poser people use those functions?  I've made some really great models and I think with a little bit of honing in - I could sell them, but I don't want to just "plop" my items out onto the marketplace.  I really am interested to know what people need/want and what is acceptable.

Comments, suggestions & questions are welcome.

Yes, theres some products that use not normal maps, but displacement maps to generate details.

I for one would love to see a zbrush model that could be imported into Vue without headaches :D

what i think is ALOT off poly is over 50K...but normal OK is abot 100K for just about any program to handle these days...

Quote - I for one would love to see a zbrush model that could be imported into Vue without headaches :D

Take a look at my freebie head thingies then :biggrin: - they go from ZBrush - Poser - Vue with nothing done to the mesh at all.  I did a rock face too which comes in at about 250K polys and Vue copes with it ok.

the daz figures seem to run about 60K polys , if you assume a similar amount for clothes thats 120K polys per figure in the scene. I prefer to see lower poly counts because my system is low on memory and it drags with a couple figures loaded in Poser or daz studio.

Quote - Do poser people use those functions?

Some use displacement, some have yet to venture that far - it depends whether you want to reach the absolute maximum audience or not. Displacement won't work in early versions of Poser*, and I believe it works differently in DAZ|Studio (but that's just a matter of making alternative material settings if so). It's also worth noting that there's been some discussion about using Zbrush's 16 bit displacement maps in Poser. With a bit of node juggling in the material room, you can use the full map resolution (65,536 displacement levels) as opposed to only 8 bits (256 displacement levels). I can probably dig up the relevant discussion threads in the Poser forum if you can't find them.

As to what is an appropriate poly count, of course that depends on the model. A major scene element such as a ship or a city would naturally be expected to use more resources than a model of, say, a grain of rice. :) As the others have said, most of your potential customers will be able easily to handle a figure plus clothing - that much again shouldn't be too much of a strain.

• Below 5? Or below 6? I can't remember...

The downside to using displacement maps is that many render engines convert the displacement into many more polygons at render time so system resources get hammered at the time it matters most - the render. It can be better to model localalised detail rather than allow a displacement function to subdivide the whole mesh.