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One of the most important things when modeling things for games is to determine approximately how many total polygons are going to be displayed on the screen at once, and how many your rendering engine can take before slowing down too much. If you are going to have many instances of a model on the screen at the same time, you need a much smaller poly count.
For example, in Warcraft 3, I seem to remember that none of the models exceed 300 polys. Since so many models are on the screen at once, they need small poly counts.
The same was true when I did modeling for Counter-Strike. I don't remember exactly, but I think CS models were around 800 polys. They used smoothing groups (a very easy thing to do in MAX) to make things seem rounded. If you zoom in really closely on any CS model's helmet, you can probably tell where the edges of the polygons that make the helmet up are, and see the smoothing.
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