- last post: 01.01.0001 12:00 AM PDT
I can see how working somewhere would require you to restrict yourself a bit. simply put, whenever I do anything for somebody else's use, other than the sole purpose of a render, I keep polys low.
Approximately 1.93 million polygons. Ouch. And only one freakin light source, too.
I will tell you that the grass and water plants are the killer. They are 6-sided cylinders with multiple joints, so each has quite a few faces. Multiply that by about 10000+ blades of grass. The reason I use the 3D method instead of a 2D one is for the sake of reality. 2D grass appears just that up close, plus I wanted realistic shadowing and reflections.
When I do get my new CAD pc built (dual opteron 242's, 2gigs of RAM, 3D Labs Wildcat Realizm 100), I will use NURBS instead of normal vertices and polys. See, I would use them now, but I'd have to reduce the poly count by about 80%. Even now my pc gets 1-5fps in the editing/modeling perspective, and that's when it isn't even rendering anything.