300k Xp Fortnite

[Hilda Bagnoli]

hii have a robot character that i will be retopo soon, the old high poly model was 300 thousand on blender, but to put in unreal that probably not wise, so how many polygons should it be for my detailed robotic character? i am planning to add around about 15 to 20 enemies just in case that helps for how many models would be in the scenes, might not be helpful though

Well 300k for a robot is a bit excessive but beyond that no one can really tell you what the fixed budget should be. In Unreal there is no such thing as a polycount budget as there is no fixed limit as to the density of the asset being imported.

The goal is to use the minimum amount of resources (triangles, textures, materials) to make the model look as good as it can. So first you define how the art has to look, then you can figure out what the minimum resources necessary are to make it look that good.

And it takes a few tries to whittle it down. Nobody will get it right on the first time, not even the most experienced professional. It is a process of testing to figure out what the right amount of resources will be. So work in a way that allows you to go back and change things at any part of the pipeline without it making you want to pull your hair out.

If you are just trying to learn and get a general sense, you could grab the free paragon assets and take note of what hardware that game was intended for, and what sort of game type it was. That gives you some ballpark figure, but in your own projects the only way to really know what the right budget is is through testing.

On your first test your model may have 100k triangles and five materials. Then you realize through playing the game that you can reduce the texture sizes a lot without anybody being able to see a difference, and you could combine some materials, and you also notice that most of the time the camera is so far away that individual triangles are drawing on top of eachother. So then you have a clear idea of how you can rework the model to make it more efficient.

By the end of several iterations, you might have a model with 20k triangles and one material. And for your specific game, that might be the minimum resources necessary to keep that model looking how you want it to.

(one other thing - the real limiting factor might not be rendering in unreal, but animating the model in your DCC. If you have a lot of animations to do, a higher resolution model can make that work very tedious. There is ways to work aroudn this of course, but assuming you are doing straightforward beginner workflows, this is an area you would want to test.)

Do you need eyeballs/lashes/nose rendered at all times / can you get away with swapping models based on visibility?

(This is also applicable to robots. Maybe the face can just be a simple flat thing 90% of the time (3rd person)).

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