Low Poly?
 

All right, this may be the worlds dumbest question, but what exactly would be considered as a low poly model? My professors always told me that fewer than 4000 is low poly, but I've seen other people that have "low poly" models upwards of 11,000 polys.


What is considered low poly in the industry???

For games its around 3000 or so now, before it was between 1500 to 2000.... 11,000 seems a bit high for low poly more like mid to high res mesh.

There are 2 versions of low Poly. One is for games. I think that’s what your professor might have bean referring to. The other Low poly is HiPoly art characters or models for film use. for instance I have a dragon that I have done that is 12k faces un-smoothed. That is the low poly version. The face count is so high because of the level of detail on it. However it is called Low poly because that is the un-smoothed or proxy cage version that people work with and tweak. I mean 12k faces I can deal with, but try tweaking the vertices on 230k faces. That’s what the model is after 2 smoothes.

It really depends on the kind of game being made. The game I'm a part of right now, for example, has 1500 poly characters.

generally for characters around 1500 to 2k, sometimes 3k depending on the game environment