For something like small decor props that may exist in extremely large numbers, do you guys have a polygon budget?
TL;DRThere's no strict polygon limit for small props; the team is more careful with materials, textures and draw calls, spends polygons where they help close-up quality, and uses LODs that roughly halve the polygon count each step.
Yes and no. Because of the quality of the game we're making, a lot of these props are interactive. You can pick them up, you can look at them, or you will be able to eventually pick them up and interact with them. We need to make sure that they stand up to quality. One of the things that we are really conscious of is our draw calls and our material usage. We obviously are very conscious about our vertex count and our poly count budget, but we're more conscious of our materials and texture usage. Our layer blend materials are slightly different to the way the ship teams and the environment team work. It shares a bit more with the way the character and the weapons teams work. But it gives us the ability to get really high-fidelity surfacing on assets but still maintain nice cheap draw calls, which is the really important thing for us.
One thing that's changed the way I think about stuff while working here is that the size of a prop, to me, is the size of a prop in screen space, right? So where it is on the screen. You may have this coffee mug, which when I hold it here is the same size relative to the screen as a shipping container 200 meters away. So you have to consider that you're making something to fit that amount of screen space. You're not making something that size.
And it's about spending the budget wisely, I think, is the best way to put it. If we're looking at assets and they've got lots of stuff they don't need because you're never going to see it, then that's not a good asset. But if an asset is slightly more expensive, but it really improves the silhouette and makes sure that it stands up, like Cory says, when you see it up nice and close, that's where we're like, yeah, do you know what? Okay, the poly count's a bit more, but by increasing the poly count, we're not needing as much texture space. We're not needing as many unique materials. That makes sense. So it's about balancing where the asset is going to be used. If we're making stuff that we know for a fact is never going to be interacted with, you're never going to get close to it, then we'll make it as cheap as we possibly can. But most of our stuff, or the smaller-scale assets, is interactive. So it's about just being smart with it, really.
And we're also very keen on things like doing LODs, good LODs that halve the poly count each time. So even if you have this coffee cup and it may be, say, 300 triangles or so when it's in the mid-range distance and maybe a bit more when it's up close, you're not necessarily drawing all those polys all the time, because it may just be on a desk.
And for anybody that hasn't watched every single broadcast we've ever done, LODs are our levels of detail. Close up, it's at full resolution, full polys, full tris. And as you go farther away, it drops back, usually through five stages, until you get to what's just barely more than a pixel.