Poly Count in Unity games. 3d Asset detail

Question

I've begun making my own characters for my games. These are just tests that I copied from other references (ie. Cartoons TV etc). I used Maya with the 'Convert Smooth Preview To Polygons' to make the mesh nice and smooth.

However upon importing to Unity, perhaps I am wrong, but the number of polys looks way higher than models I just downloaded from Unity Store etc.

If I continue making ALL my assets in this detail, would the game run ok. (I'm targeting PC, not mobile phones. And I don't mind if low end pcs struggle but anything mid-range and up.)

Should this detail be ok and I can focus on my game dev? Or should I spend some more time trying to reduce the poly count on my models (without compromising too much detail)?

Thanks

Answer 1

The polygon count you can get away with depends on a ton of details:

• How many objects you have in the scene
• How many different objects you have in the scene
• How many non-baked light sources shine on them
• How computationally complex your shaders are
• What minimum hardware configuration you intend to target

The only way to find out how close you are to exceeding your polygon budget is to regularly test your game and check the framerate. When your game is not in a state of development where you have a scene which looks close to the final product, then it can make sense to set up a couple "stress test" scenes where you just throw in a ton of objects to see how much you can get away with before the FPS start to drop.