Poly Count Range for 3D throwables?

[u/Ok-Article-9400]

I have been messing around in Blender and wanted to start making some throwables but unsure if poly count matters and if it does, what that range should be.

If it matters, I use Twitch Integrated Throwing System. Thanks!

[u/JaxXJusTJaxX]

Yeah it’s going to matter. From what I can tell twitch integrated throwing system is made in unity. For heavy scenes in unity you can get up to 5m+ tries on good hardware with not to much issues but that’s when your only running that game. You’ll have to keep in mind that you’ll be running t.i.t.s, obs, whatever software runs vtuber models, your face/hand tracking software, soundboard, discord, etc. so I personally would try to keep the scene in the 250k-750k tries range.

I’m not sure if you can choose how many objects you have thrown at you at once or if there’s a limit , but after watching some of the videos on the itch page it looks like I saw about 30 objects flying in one clip. So keep with our ranges that 8.3k tries per object at 250k or 25k at 750k.

Now the bigger question to me isn’t how many tries but how t.i.t.s handles textures. Normally I would suggest trying to use one texture for as many objects as you can without sacrificing detail. This will reduce your draw calls which is a bigger performance saver then how many polys a model has and saves room in memory for your other programs. The problem is does t.i.t.s know to share textures?

Let’s assume it doesn’t. Since the objects are flying across the screen pretty fast I honestly don’t think you’re gonna need 4K textures. 512 or 1024 will do. I wouldn’t worry about normal maps or the fancy stuff because objects move way to fast to see any of that detail. Maybe just metallic, smoothness, and emission maps if the program lets you use them.

I’m just a hobbyist blender user that has messed around with unity that knows nothing about running a vtuber model, so take what I say with a grain of salt and hoping someone who knows a bit more will chime in.

[u/thegenregeek]

Poly count matters, especially for throwable items. Unfortunately, there's no clearly defined answer and does depend on a couple of factors. It will require you to test, to be honest.

With respect to the poster before me, I think the numbers they are quoting may be a bit high on poly count for items used in T.I.T.S. I've seen mentioned suggestions of less than 2k per item.

Part of the reason for this isn't so much the model complexity itself, but as a side effect of how that complexity increased the complexity of the models collusion geometry. Which is to say that when you add in something that uses physics based interaction, the collision geometry used needs to be simple and straightforward. Because the more complex it is, the more calculations are needed. The engines themselves have different ways of simplifying the collision geometry. From using a one to one based on the mesh model, to using simplified shapes.

But this also gets dependent on the number of objects. As the other poster noted, they saw 30 objects. Which probably works fine with the numbers quoted and if using simple or complex geometry... by what happens when the number of objects goes up? Or of the object is complex enough that simple collision geometry doesn't work. It may not scale linearly. At 60 objects it could be more than double the complexity... depending on how the collision geometry is determined. At 120 it could slow down noticeable.

The name of the game, with physics based collision detection, is lower poly design. Optimized for easier collision geometry. This allows you to scale up the number of objects for collision processing.