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For a double increase in polygons from 3000 to 6000, the PS3 Steef looks far closer to the CGI 529,000 polygon model.
Isn't that weird?
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No, it isn't, at least for me. The polygon subdivision is exponential, so you just need one or two subdivisions and, after that, you won't get a lot more of detail.
In other words, you will still be dividing polygons (or quads) but there's a point from where every subdivided mesh looks like the previous.
It is like polishing a ball, when you get a nice smooth surface you can still polish it but you won't see any difference unless you use magnifier tools.
And then there go textures.. When you work in videogames, you see the normal map makes the highest work over the mesh. If you use not just normal map but a combination of it, the diffuse (along with an ambient oclussion map), specular, opacity and detail map the result is awesome.
The thing I don't get is that the Steef high poly model has a texture.
When making low poly models for games, you need to extract a normal map from somewhere. You can do a high poly model first (extremely detailed) and, over it, make another mesh which is the low poly, then do a 'projection' to 'extract' a normal map from the high poly mesh to apply to the low poly mesh.
The other way is to make a low poly mesh and subdividing it to make details (for example, you export the base mesh and sculpt it in Zbrush or Mudbox). Then extract a normal map.
From this, I'm meaning that the high poly model (called CGI in the picture) is just a mesh to take a normal map from (so doesn't need to be unwrapped, neither use a texture), and this one is showing textures (which needs unwrapping first). Now, this leads me to the question: Why have they unwrapped a high poly model?
This means that either they wanted to see the result of the diffuse over the high poly mesh (which is senseless, as you can see, the game model [in the middle] looks like the high poly) or that they are going to use it somewhere. If the last option is the right, it probably means that they are rendering the cutscenes again, and not using the old ones.