Triangles Rendered

Triangle count, lights, reflection planes, etc, geo buffers, and render calls all have to be managed by the developer based on the requirements of the project and the list of end-user devices it has to play on. The fact that your triangle count is high is not due to the model but is due to the number of lights. 500,000 polys depending on your application requirements might be ok.

A simple solution….it depends on your meaning of simple. Effective….absolutely depending on your application requirements.

If your application is going to be a desktop app then you don’t have any issues. If your app is going to be placed on a public website you have some work to do. At a high level, you are going to need to do the following:

1. First determine if you really need those lights. Each light you use multiplies the number of triangles that is required to be rendered. Delete your lights and test your scene for triangle count and you will see the impact your lights have. You would be best served using a good HDR environment map and if necessary creating all you static lights and shadows using baked texture maps. So reduce if not eliminate your lights.

2. Reduce your geo / poly count. If your model has good topology to start it should be very simple to reduce it. You can keep your detail by baking the normals from a high poly model to a low poly model. While you are doing this you can increase your bevel count and capture that data detail in your baked textures too. If you are targeting mobile phones…get your triangle count under extremely low. Determine how long a user should be required to wait to run your app using 3G, 4G etc based on the lowest bandwidth your app needs to support. That will give you a file size target. From their you can start working backwards to get a polygon count and texture size count that will work for you. Often times its just better to create two completely different model sets…one for destkop and one for mobile but this will depend on your needs.

3. Use atlas maps. You want to use a few texture maps as possible this means making bigger maps but fewer of them this will reduce the redraw count.

4. decide whether you require realtime reflection maps or whether that can be baked in as well. If you can bake it…. it will increase the performance of your app.

5. Combine all static geo into a single mesh.

6. Be sure to use image compression.

Good luck