High polygon Assets

This doc is an overview of high polygon creation as well as methods to optimize these assets for use in production.

All of the tutorials so far have focused on low polygon assets which are fantastic for performance. There are games that look like high polygon assets but are actually low to medium polygon assets with high polygon detail projected, or baked, into the texture.

Polycount Considerations

High Polygon assets should be optimised before using them in game, especially for Mobile, Standalone VR/XR, and WebGL experiences in order to make sure that the end users have the best looking result as well as most comfortable experience possible.

If the polycount of the experience is too high, then the frame rate might become too low which is very important with fast paced games like first person shooters or racing games.

VR/XR requires a minimum 80 frames per second so that users don't get Virtual Reality Sickness, which is very similar to motion sickness. The recommended VR experience frame rate is more than 90 frames per second, and as a headset may need to render twice the frames (one for each eye) the amount of processing is more than a single screen device. The more popular headsets are standalone such as the Quest 3 or Pico 4, and only have high end Mobile device hardware so their limited power makes optimisation extremely important if you want a comfortable experience. This is why most Standalone VR/XR experiences use low polygon asset creation approaches.

High Polygon Creation

There are many ways to do high polygon assets depending on what kind of assets you want to create.

Hard Surface Modelling

Hard Surface Modelling is used for assets that are inorganic such as vehicles, weapons, environmental props etc. Basically things that have a hard surface. These require high polygons due to the clean bevels and edges that you might want in the result.

Digital Sculpting

Digital Sculpting is used on organic assets such as characters or creatures. This was popularized by an application called ZBrush, but Blender now has this feature as well. It basically looks like sculpting real clay, just in a digital format. The polycount of these assets are usually in the millions and therefore can easily slow down the creation pipeline when making content in Blender and game engines.

Photogrammetry / Gaussian Splatting

Photogrammetry and Gaussian Splatting is the result of scanning real world 3D assets using photos and Photogrammetry or Gaussian Splatting software. This software doesn't usually use optimised approaches to asset creation, instead it tries to create the most accurate result as possible which usually ends up with assets with higher than ideal polycounts.

AI Generation

AI Generated assets are getting better over time. At the moment the end result is still lacking in many cases, but in pretty much all cases may have a high polycount as a result.

Optimization Approaches

There are multiple ways to create lower polygon assets: Retopology, Decimation, and Remeshing.

Retopology

Once the high polygon assets are completed you can trace them with low polygon assets and then project the high polygon detail into the low polygon textures using normal maps. This process is called Retopology. We will be using this technique in order to get the best looking results with the lowest polycount.

Decimation and Remeshing

Decimation and Remeshing is a faster approach, but at the moment these are not very good for high quality assets as they aren't as good with optimising the asset in comparison to manual creation. They can be useful to create a starting point however.