What is a good amount of triangles/vertices/faces for a mesh body?

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 hour ago, Cyrule Adder said:

The majority of AAA games will have hero characters of 15k to 40k polygons on average. This is for the entire body, including heads, hands, feet, and clothing.

This is kind of a disingenuous point. While it's true, the environments those bodies are in are completely different. Context matters.

Final Fantasy 14 (a 'massively multiplayer' game) for example has a standard body type that is used for almost all races (and the two recently new races that don't use it are suffering from lacking outfits), and the outfits will outright replace parts of the body with optimized pieces. This means that, for example, a top with exposed shoulders won't have any topology for the chest or arms. Any exposed skin is part of the top itself, not the original avatar.

Meanwhile in Second Life the body and outfit are generally made entirely separate from each other, by different people with independent goals. One creator puts all their effort into producing a generalized naked body with its own set of features, while another creator puts all their effort into producing an outfit with its own set of features and retrofitting it to one or more of those bodies. This means that while you can hide parts of the body, that technically unnecessary topology is still there.

Edited April 16, 2021 by Wulfie Reanimator

[Cyrule Adder]

8 minutes ago, Wulfie Reanimator said:

This is kind of a disingenuous point. While it's true, the environments those bodies are in are completely different. Context matters.

Final Fantasy 14 (a 'massively multiplayer' game) for example has a standard body type that is used for almost all races (and the two recently new races that don't use it are suffering from lacking outfits), and the outfits will outright replace parts of the body with optimized pieces. This means that, for example, a top with exposed shoulders won't have any topology for the chest or arms. Any exposed skin is part of the top itself, not the original avatar.

Meanwhile in Second Life the body and outfit are generally made entirely separate from each other, by different people with independent goals. One creator puts all their effort into producing a generalized naked body with its own set of features, while another creator puts all their effort into producing an outfit with its own set of features and retrofitting it to one or more of those bodies. This means that while you can hide parts of the body, that technically unnecessary topology is still there.

This is true, but the point I was making was more to the Maitreya's awful levels of optimization. It's not exactly possible to compensate for the user's additional geometry without asking them to cut off parts of the body that they do not use (that are infact removable due to many bodies splitting pieces off for the Alpha layers.)

[Wulfie Reanimator]

1 minute ago, Cyrule Adder said:

This is true, but the point I was making was more to the Maitreya's awful levels of optimization. It's not exactly possible to compensate for the user's additional geometry without asking them to cut off parts of the body that they do not use (that are infact removable due to many bodies splitting pieces off for the Alpha layers.)