A bit of background: I'm currently working on developing a freeware version of CEZ3 Cooking Lake, which is a very busy GA airport / seaplane base in north central Alberta. It's a great scenery for me to pursue, as it's never been done and it's easy for me to go out and take pictures at. It's slow going though, since it's required me to truely learn something over and above creating an afcad.

 

One of the features of the airport is that it has a lot of open air parking, with quite a few small GA planes out in the open in the summer. I really want to accurately portray this, so I've been working in Gmax to create some simple static planes so that I can have a mix between AI and static scenery models.

 

Which brings me to the question - what would be an acceptable poly count for a static GA model? Obviously there's a trade off between close-up realism and low poly performance. What should I be aiming for, with the end goal of having about 20 or so static models present?

 

EDIT: Not sure if this makes a difference, but this is primarily being developed for FS9.

In FS9 on today's computers I would say poly count is all but irelevant. It depend on the airport of course, but I would think on a smaller GA airport you could get away with a few extra polys without a detrimental effect. I built a gmax pickup truck intended to be used as a scenery object for FS9 and it came in at a little over 1600 polys according to gmax's polygon counter. I considered that "high" as it was a fairly elaborate model. It had things like side mirrors, license plates, hood emblems, etc. which were all modeled in gmax. I later built a subaru outback with an eye for fewer polys, it came in at around 400 polys yet still looked quite detailed. I placed several instances of both of these models in the sim and ran it on an old 2.2 ghz Athlon XP machine with a Geforce 7800 and didn't see any real performance problems. This was with some fairly elaborate building models in place as well, a groundpoly, some photoreal+autogen, etc.

 

I think drawcalls are actually more significant than polygons personally, so in my opinion it's more important to try to cram as much texturing as possible onto each texture sheet and limit the number of materials used on each model wherever possible.

 

Jim

Thanks for the info, Jim. On the Cessna 185 I'm currently modelling, I have a poly count of 635, but I still have the wheels and prop to do. I've been trying to leave some of the detail out and let that be shown in texturing, but I was starting to worry about the poly count getting high. The airport is in a pretty sparse region, so I probably have a bit of extra leeway regardless.

 

I still might try and get it down further. A challenge is a challenge, I guess!

 

On a side note, I modelled my FJ Cruiser as a scenery object. That was I can see my own truck when I land. Fun stuff.