models and ploy limits

Hi publish game makers

I was talking with 3 artist 3d modelrs who had a interest in working in this community. They have questions about ploy limit for models.
max limits for a single model
determining limits for polys based on number of objects in scene
how to correctly determain lod poly steps .
Wither the engine uses facades" - some idea where the engine determiners the sides of builds that are visible , visible sides are mixed at full lod with none visible sides at lowest lod and then the clipping away of none visible ploys is fast because less ploys need to be clippd - I really didn't understand to well this question they asked

its called polygons I guess and max is 64k

So I should tell them they can make anything or any scene as long as no more the 64k polygons are visible on scene?

64k is for one model. test the performance, it really depends on your game. somewhere in the manual there is a description about it. of course old text, but good as a reference (hardware is much stronger now).
as a rough approximation, if you have a few characters only they can be 10k, but if a hundred they should be max 1k.

Hi,
that is a vertex count limit and for each entity. The max polycount of a scene depends on materials and machine. I remember been able to render more than 2M polygons with simple materials and less than 50K with depthmaps, normalmaps and multiple views involved. The max polycount of a scene is not really measurable with no defined rendering pipeline. I would say there is no reference by the way.

The LOD system of the engine is a raw lod stage management, inherited from dx I think. No facades and no soft steps merging.

Salud!

Thank you all for the replies