Am I modeling too Poly HI?
 

Hey everyone. Here are a few images. Considering 90% of this is made up of Boxes which are bandsawed twice on each face to subpatch the corners and give it a nice rounded edge wood feel, is this too poly hi? Im going for a hi level of realism and right now Im at a total of 12,500 polys.



http://astro.temple.edu/~bforce/images/porch01.gif

http://astro.temple.edu/~bforce/images/porch02.gif

I was thinkin I could get an equally good effect if I bevel the edges and just have smoothing on.

What do you guys think?

well, if ur going for a photorealistic scene, with perfect lighting and stuff like that, then, i don't really think its too hi-poly. But if u really feel like ur computer is slowing down or it can't handle the stuff, then u'll have to cut down a little bit...

I agree, as long as your computer are cooping and your not going to animate it you shouldnt worry about the poly count too much.. if your going to animate it you have to think about rendering times a little more.. nice work so far.

Most of your polys are probably in the chains so I would say you aren't using too many. Do you have a close-up wireframe of the chain?

unless you're modeling for real-time (like games) it's hard to get too high. You can pretty much do as much as your computer can handle.

Yeah I'm not planning on doing any animation. Im just afraid when I get a lot of lights set up on this its gonna take forever to render. And you know it takes a lot of tweaking to get it to look how you want it. Here is a portion of my chains:

http://astro.temple.edu/~bforce/images/chains.gif

The chains layer is 7500 poly's. That is more than half my total poly count.

I did some work:

http://astro.temple.edu/~bforce/images/porchrender.jpg

looks good!:) Radiosity i expect....?

i second that looking good so far :)

Thanks guys. I really like how it came out. It's kind of dream like. It reminds me of how the mexico scenes where shot in Traffic. It's kind of sad that I'm going to texture it all and probably ruin it.

Anyways there is no radiosity. It's all area lights. I tinted my main area light (the sun source) a slight yellow. I have 3 other area's comming down from other angles also with yellow tints, but lower intensity. Then I got like 6 comming up from the ground with a light blue and very low intensity.

It was really a test render and I noticed I couldnt see the tint at all so I took a snap shot of the screen and went into photoshop. I applied a few adjustment layers and it made a huge difference.

What do you guys reckon for the black? I was going to just use an alpha channel and composite a forest image in because I don't have compositing practice, then blur it out of focus. I tested with this and realized the focus should change too noticable in the camera angle and I'm not sure how I would go about it in photoshop.