What are your limitations polygon count-wise? The barrel's flash hider looked like it had a ton of polygons in it. Is gaming really moving away from polygon restrictions?

Yeah, I think I can say something about that. So you can see this one, together with the magazine, is around 52,000 polygons, which sounds like quite a bit, but you need to consider we have a different workflow than most other studios have. So our workflow is custom normals. So all these, at the front... oh, Jake is showing it with the cube here. So yeah, this has 12, and if you bevel it, it already has 44. But if you select the vertices on it now, if you can select all of them, you will see that it's 24. And that's because of the hard edges here; the hard edges basically split the object into multiple faces on the left cube.

And each face has vertices, right?

Exactly. And the vertex count is actually the same for them, or nearly the same. So what actually matters in the end is the vertex count. And another thing that matters is small polygons, but we are using levels of detail on the weapon. So after about one meter or one meter fifty, it's already getting rid of the small little bevels here at the side. So basically after one meter fifty, you see the left cube instead of the right cube.

Right, so our weapons use the same LODs that ships do, so that way when we look up close at it, we can see all the full crazy detail. And then everybody else who's running around in-game, they're seeing a lower LOD version until they get really up close.

It's also worth mentioning, and I'm not an engineer or a graphics programmer, so this is going to be a layman's explanation, but the advantage of this workflow where you're putting a lot of detail in the geometry: of course, it will increase your triangle count, your vertex count. However, in a lot of games, like I said earlier, they actually bake the high poly information into a lower poly version, and they create a texture for that called a normal map, which essentially per pixel will give you the angle. Say you have 200 props or weapons in a scene and you're loading in 200 of those unique textures, it's quite a lot of texture memory. Whereas with our workflow, we do use textures for some things like POMs, the materials themselves and so on, but we don't have a lot of unique texture memory taken up per asset. We're basically taking up more overhead in terms of poly count, but we're also reducing the amount of texture overhead in a way. So it's swings and roundabouts. I think hardware is a huge part of that, and that's not really a topic I'm hugely educated on, actually, what modern specs are for graphics cards. It's a difficult one to really explain as an artist, but essentially we're prioritizing reducing texture memory versus the amount of triangles we have.