In Game Environment/Characters

"For every major character, we build two versions of the geometry: a renderable mesh with unique UV coordinates, and a detail mesh containing only geometry. We run the two meshes through the Unreal Engine 3 pre-processing tool and generate a high-res normal map for the renderable mesh, based on analyzing all of the geometry in the detail mesh."

With this idea of having a two forms of low and high poly characters we can do the same process of taking the high res normal mapping onto the low poly character to have the same detail of the high poly model but only having an actual low poly version.

These are taken from the Unreal engine on a typical character model.

Renderable Mesh: We build renderable meshes with 3,000-12,000 triangles, based on the
expectation of 5-20 visible characters in a game scene.


Detail Mesh: We build 1-8 million triangle detail meshes for typical characters. This
is quite sufficient for generating 1-2 normal maps of resolution
2048x2048 per character.

Bones: The highest LOD version of our characters typically have 100-200 bones,
and include articulated faces, hands, and fingers.

Environments

Typical environments contain 1000-5000 total renderable objects, including static meshes and skeletal meshes. For reasonable performance on current 3D cards, we aim to keep the number of visible objects in any given scene to 300-1000 visible objects. Our larger scenes typically peak at 500,000 to 1,500,000 rendered triangles.