Optimization Question: How many Polygons would you use in a gun

Hey there! i have a new workflow in blender to make even better meshes but it seems that this new workflow puts more detail in the overal mesh, traditionally my guns would have around 11k Polygons but i want to go higher without risking the perfomance on the endplayer, how much polygons would you think are good for a gun?

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I mean if you are only accounting for optimization then probably 4 polygons would be good haha. In all seriousness, I think it solely should be determined by your game’s design and build style. If you find yourself having to make a low poly gun to save memory while your game’s build style is high poly, then make the gun high poly! There is no “good polygon amount” for guns, it just depends on your game’s build style.

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Thanks for your reply! defenitely going for the 40k Polygons gun! :stuck_out_tongue:

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Idk if that’s the best idea. If 12 players each have unique guns and you don’t have some sort of LoD system that’s almost 500,000 polys… that you also have to load. Something safer is like 10k. Still very detailed but not a pain for lower end PCs.

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I see, by unique guns you mean different types of meshes?

Because i know that the same type of mesh copied many times is rendered a few times because of instancing, or i might be wrong.

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I guess you gotta find a trade off between making authentic-looking guns and excessive fine details.

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At that point I’d be adding detail in the texture. You can (and should) almost always increase detail with textures and not by increasing the complexity of geometry.

Check out the iconic Assault Rifle from Halo; almost all of the gun’s detail is a texture (or height map, which I know isn’t applicable to Roblox, but you can get creative with shading to get CloseTM), not adding in faces.

Games do this because you see all of 25% of the gun at any time (not counting melee or other actions), and most of the time the designers allocate more detail to that visible 25% more than the rest of the model (hence why the magazine counter UI is fairly high detail).
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Unless the gun is on the ground, but this is such a minor asset by this point that most of the time as long as the player can identify the gun, the geometry doesn’t matter all that much.

Remember to allocate your resources to make the game as performance-friendly as possible. As a player I don’t care about how nice a gun looks if I can’t play the game.

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I never really thought about textures like that. great point

Yeah i see what you mean, i wish we had Normal Maps or Height maps but i will look into that, btw do you have any example of the shading thing you say?

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Roof textures are usually achieved by shading in areas to give depth (nothing to do with flat or smooth shading, I mean the artistic form of “shading in shadowed areas,” sorry for the confusion). You can see that the shadowed or split shingles of these roof textures (compliments of Google images haha) give depth in the texture by adding in shadows, without adding in extra faces.


A height map would obviously look better since light would cast a shadow automatically, but there’s nothing stopping you from drawing in those shadows yourself - though they wouldn’t look As Good, for something as minor as a roof (in most cases), it’s passable.


Edit: here’s a beautiful example of how using a low poly count but good texture can still look amazing. This entire model has 919 tris.


Final example would be this lantern pole I modelled and textured. The shadows on the stone part is drawn on, which obviously looks inferior to a height map (as far as dynamic light casting goes), but again, it’s about allocating resources - not just in memory use but also in time invested in each asset. Your project manager would not be happy if you spent two days on the roof of a house that the player would see for five seconds before going inside :stuck_out_tongue:
TexturePractice01

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I would consider first what the style of your game is. For a game that is very simplistic, a model with less triangles would be fair. If you want a more realistic experience but a very optimized model, go for that but find elements that can either be reduced or removed so that they don’t impact the triangle count as much.

Using the smooth feature in blender is very nice because you can end up using a low amount of triangles but still keep a somewhat smooth edge for the realism.

Something I like to keep in mind is how many triangles certain AAA games use. CS:GO, being a well optimized game, has a very low triangle count. Their guns usually peak at around 10k triangles for the lowest quality settings. Most hardware can run this but i’d go just a bit lower when working with Roblox.

All in all, for realistic designs make sure to cap your triangle count around 7-8k to make sure that most hardware can run it. For less graphically advanced games, go lower with the triangle count so you don’t end up ruining someones day by having an excessive amount that isn’t necessary.

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Please refer to my original post on this thread as I explained this thoroughly. Unless you can show me a wireframe for a CS:GO weapon to prove me wrong, CS:GO’s guns almost definitely don’t use 10k triangles for one gun - sure the tri count is high but not that high. And even if it is (for whatever reason) that high, that’s definitely not applicable or necessary for Roblox. Allocate resources.

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High tri count does not always mean high quality. You’re just making more work for yourself when you unwrap for your UVs.


As I said in my post, they (usually) use height maps, normal maps, and high resolution textures, not overly-complicated geometry.


I’m pointing this out because there is a lot of misinformation that goes around for best practices concerning modelling and clarification keeps new devs away from bad habits.

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Yeah i know that point, i actually use myself Substance Painter for Unreal engine 4 projects so i keep my guns there pretty low as the engine is much better and has more features, but on roblox i cant seem to find other option more than just more polys, but i will jsut take a try at this of shading.

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Yeah it’s very unfortunate that Roblox doesn’t provide us with bump maps. I would hope we see this in the near future but recently I can’t say much and have been quite unhappy all together.

I was mostly estimating the 10k triangle count because I know that the highest/max count for models by fact IS around 30,000 triangles for weapons like the AWP and AK47.