Today’s blog isn’t about any glitches or bugs. As such, it is going to be one of the shorter blogs as well. It is going to be about polygons, the geometric shapes that make up the “scaffolding” of the models in 3D video games.
As described in a previous blog, models are one of the most important aspects of a video game. However, when it comes to 3D models, they can only exist through polygons. The polygons act as the scaffolding or clay in which the model is built out of.
They are called polygons because they are geometric, 2D planes that most often take the form of triangles. These triangles interlock with each other to make the various contours and shapes within the model, and the more polygons there are, the smoother the model looks, and vice versa.
The player can tell when something is low poly when it looks blocky or jagged. This is because there are less polygons to make the surface appear smooth. Or, to look at it a different way, the polys (plural for polygon) are large enough that the player can see them.
In modern gaming, polygon count — the amount of polygons that make up a model — can be in the tens of thousands, if not higher (especially during pre-rendered cutscenes where the models can be as detailed as the company wants them to be). But this comes with a tradeoff. The more polygons there are in a model and the more models there are on-screen, the more the engine has to work to render them all. What that means is that, the higher the polygon count, the more lag — how much the game slows down — there will be.
Because of this, one of the biggest ongoing issues with gaming is how to increase the amount of polys there are in the game without harming how the game runs. This usually takes the form of cutting some corners — not fully modeling something that isn’t visible, lowering the poly count for models far enough away so the player can’t see the lower quality, using cardboard cutouts (2D textures that represent a 3D object), among other things.
The lower the poly count, the higher the frame rate, and the higher the poly count, the lower the frame rate. There are exceptions, but that tends to be how it works.
However, sometimes, it just isn’t worth the effort of trying to hide the lower poly models. Or, it might not be possible to hide them at all, and the game just has to accept the lower models being visible.
If the models are in an area where the player won’t be spending too much time, the models will tend to be lower poly. Or, if the models weren’t meant to be seen up close, such as decoration, then the models will be low poly as well.
Of course, this isn’t always the case, and sometimes fully modeled objects with high poly count can be found in the most hidden corner of a game, with no apparent reason for its high quality.
Regardless of the reason for how high or low poly a model is, polygons are required when working with 3D models.
