As feedback I have received a suggestion to research into polygon total and give myself a budget to work with throughout the modelling process. This would have to consider the game engine I will work within (UDK) and also it's limitations in terms of exporting and also texture creation restrictions.
To begin I will by talking about texture limits, from past experience I have found that UDK will only accept textures that are created in 8 bit mode on Adobe Photoshop, this however is not a problem and but a small tweak on the texture creation process. Without doing this, the program appears to crash and close as the texture import process begins, I must avoid this to not waste time. Also upon researching game design forums I have found that UDK will only accept textures in powers of 2, this is also a good habit to get into as other game engines will have the same principle. So 256 x 256, 512 x 512, 1024 x 1024, 2048 x 2048 and 4096 x 4096 are acceptable, however I don't plan to be using the last suggestion as these are considered texture sizes for 'hero' models or player model textures..
"General textures for Static Meshes and CSG Surfaces should still be only 512x512 or 1024x1024 in most cases, with only high detailed textures being at 2048x2048, and that is it."
With this information I have decided that the maximum texture size I will use for my individual modular pieces will be 1024 x 1024 pixels, the models I'm making are not 'hero' pieces and wont need incredible texture quality, also the texture will need to be tile able as the models I'm producing will need to be seamless in texture when positioned next to each other, because of this I cant have a piece of detail that stands out on the textures or the player will see that it is easily tile able.
From a mock up model I created a few weeks ago (see previous posts) I constructed a small section of a Chinese building to get used to the Dougong building method. From this I found that the building was 10k polygons, however there are methods that I could of used to reduce the total poly count size. I was also given advice by my lecturer of how I could split up my model to reduce the poly count in terms of each model, doing this would help dramatically to individual pieces, but not the overall kit that I will be creating. This poly count is very high for what I want to create, however I am aiming to build a model that is architecturally as accurate as possible without loss of detail due to poly count size. From researching into poly count and experimenting in 3dsmax, I hope to build my whole kit to be under 45k polygons, although I would prefer to work at a higher polygon limit, this is for a game engine so it will need to be optimised as such and thus a limitation is needed to be put in place.
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| A small Pagoda I found online |
Links
http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=99738
http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/pagoda-chinese-3d-model/392786
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