I was wondering how many polys a humanoid character should have ideally, if it’s to be used for animation?
I’m quite fascinated with the characters of Clone Wars - anyone know roughly how big those are? They don’t seem very big - all folds and wrinkles seem more like it’s in the paintjob, as oppose to the mesh.
(I was watching a tutorial on characters for games - ps3 aso - and the instructor said it should be 7500 polys tops.)
It just depends. Every video game project has a budget for in-game assets. Hero characters will get a higher budget than background characters. The budgets depend on the game engine being used, the console that the game is being made for, and the scope of the project itself in terms of fidelity. So there are a lot of variables.
if it’s rendered, then poly count is less of a concern.
One of the guys that worked on Clone Wars was a demo speaker at the Pixologic booth at Siggraph a few years ago, so I know they used ZBrush to sculpt those characters.
Really? I read somewhere (wikipedia?) that all the models and backgrounds in Clone Wars were made in Maya. I have been looking for “behind the scenes” material on Clone Wars, but so far without any success.
Polycounts depend title to title, usually 10-15k but then Uncharted 2 was 35-45k per character so it varies greatly
It all depends really. I have no solid figures for those games hard to say really without having worked on them. Anything else is a best guess.
If your renderer is capable of fancy material effects, then that can potentially drag your poly count down again. Anything that wrecks tristriping can bring it down as well. How you animate it changes the count as well. Because there are multiple models for all of those operations including how you tristrip the actual polycount will be all over the shop.
For reference, the game we’re doing now looks to be able to throw 3000 polys around per character no sweat. We’re doing in game cutscenes, and it looks like we’ll be able to go significantly higher on the closeup models.
I personally think you can base current poly budgets on what massively multi player games are doing. Starwars online mentioned that there NPC models are 3000 polys and I know for a fact that many of there creature models are 5000+ polys .It really does depend on what platform you are talking about though.
Thanks for the replies, everyone. It gives me something to shoot for, for sure. 
I personally as a general rule of thumb consider the following when modeling in a production.
you have to hit a mark in a short amount of time to prove the concept in 3D
your model needs to get pushed through a pipeline
revisions will be made!
So I will block out the character and take it to a medium level of detail, then re-mesh, and continue sculpting. Once that looks ok, you can further tune the edge flow.
Considering that the poly count is totally dependent on the production, I tend to work with a base mesh that has enough to deform nicely but still low such as 5,000 to 10,000 polys.
I model completely in quads, this will serve you well if you need to add or remove edge loops. Also it renders well in mental ray and for games it triangulates, however once your model is complete you could re-mesh using tris if it is a requirement of the engine, but i personally would not start with tris.
The highest level I take models to is around 4 mil, although with HD geometry you can go higher. Simply because once you start to go over a couple of mil the details become so fine that a texture would serve the purpose better. Having said that, with careful shell placement (spilting up your model, the sky is the limit, even then each subtool would be around 4 mil if needed)
Lastly, I have seen highend film production models and they can be insanely high, meaning that most of the detail is in the model and not a map…having said that consider that you want to keep a nice silouete on your model.
So I would suggest you model from a base made of quads which will allow you to subdivide to around 4 mil with 6 subdivs.
long story short…its up to your better judgement
hope that helps