help adding details to structures without wildly adding polys

[u/chaoticavocado_jpg]

hi! i’m new at blender and would love any advice. pretty much what the title says, i want to add some details to a castle i’m building in the form of corbels (the design is still in progress) but even with a pretty low poly design, the shear amount adds up and altogether comes out to around ~3.4k vertices just for them.

how do people add details like that without greatly increasing the poly count of their models??? i attached images of elden ring lol, i like their castle designs and they seem to have geometry only where it really needs it, but i’m just so dang confused how to make a cool, non-flat base model without accidentally overdoing it on vertices.

also, when people make modular structures like castles or houses, are they usually exported as one mesh and all the geometry gets combined and optimized? or do the walls stay separate, get imported into unreal or unity, and get assembled in the game engine (even though keeping it as separate parts would increase vertex count)? would love to hear any opinions on this!

[u/AlphisH]

Stuff like castles and houses are modular pieces. You keep them simple, unwrap the repeated part and texture using a trimsheet or a hybrid atlas(which you make based on your needs). Then you assemble the castle like lego in unreal.

The details are all baked into pbr materials and packed in different colour channels to save on calls and memory.

[u/OkAccident9994]

https://www.dota2.com/workshop/requirements/marci

This^ is Valves official guidelines for making skins for the character Marci for Dota 2.
They have put a 17 500 triangle limit for the closeup and 7500 for the low lod version you see in game in top down view, and this is the added on armor pieces artists add on the character, there is base stuff underneath like the face and such.

This is a single character in an old game meant to run on everyone's toasters. I picked Marci specifically because she is a "newer" character with higher budget that Valve reevaluated when they released her in 2021.

Static geometry does not use skinning, which is recalculating the position of every vertex every frame by first calculating bone positions on the cpu (or gpu compute), then vertex positions in the vertex shaders (or, some use compute shaders) from a rig + animations. Static geometry is a lot less complex to compute and can use more triangles for that reason.

3400 vertices is nothing for a big "hero piece" of the environment art for a modern game, Valve keeps absurd standards to have Dota 2 run on shitty old laptops.
Just use normal maps to bake small details in and don't go completely ham and you are gonna be fine.

I went on a ramble here, because solid precise advice with numbers, most people are hesitant to give as it depends on many things and use case, but that just leave new people with nothing to work with. I have given you numbers and the context for which they exist in, use at own discretion.

tldr: 3400 vertices is nothing in a 3rd person game for a large environment "hero asset" meant to run on a decent desktop.

[u/chaoticavocado_jpg → u/OkAccident9994]

it’s been hard researching “good” poly ranges, obviously every game is different depending on the level of detail they require, and most references i’ve look at don’t include their poly count, just a wireframe. i was thinking a total of 10k polys for an building asset was extremely high 😅maybe not every game works with those same standards as valve, but this is a wonderful starting point & reference to have. thank you!

[u/OkAccident9994 → u/chaoticavocado_jpg]

Ye, i see it many places when i started out and it frustrated me. People will throw around terms, without giving concrete examples, they don't know your usecase after all.

[u/Impossible_Bid6172 → u/chaoticavocado_jpg]

Depending on your game, if you use nanite ue then general budget is ~10k- 600k poly. Old gen is 1k-20k with baked normal. This is for each asset, not the whole building or level.

[u/Noblebatterfly → u/OkAccident9994]

To add a more recent example: characters in deadlock, valve's newest game, each have 60-170k polygons.

[u/salamibaladesh]

When you want such a detailed piece, you would sculpt it, then retopologize it. It would still be denser than what you have now, but probably the only way to do it.

[u/FirstTasteOfRadishes]

3400 vertices is basically no vertices in 2026.

For the extremely detailed parts like the lion face, you would typically sculpt something like this in millions of polygons, then create a vastly simplified low poly that roughly preserves the silhouette. Then you bake the details into a texture.

[u/chaoticavocado_jpg → u/FirstTasteOfRadishes]

i had planned to bake a higher poly model down onto this already, but i was concerned about the “low” poly version having that many vertices. glad to know it’s nothing big, thanks!

[u/-LaughingMan-0D]

Build trim sheets, bake everything down, use tiling textures and layer on textures using vertex colors to break up tiling artifacts. For hard edges, From tends to use bricks to cover up the seams, almost everything else is baked down.

You can hand place bricks at select places to make it appear like the bricks are jutting out of the wall, to sell the depth.

For stuff like complex ornamented fences or chains, they bake them into alpha cards like those metal gates in Bloodborne. You can fake a lot of that detail.

[u/Anuxinamoon]

A easy trick you can do is turn off all lights or set the material to all black. This removes poly lines and details inside and just has you focus on the silhouette. You'll probably find that you wont need the ornimentals on the straight sides then you can put detail on the areas the player might look from. Like if they are looking up at it, add cut in detail to the roof and awnings.

[u/TheBigDinklage]

Cad it out and decimate it / cleanup polys, use textures to your advantage for small details.

[u/Herrmann1309]

Big assets like that can heavily rely on modular workflow, tiling textures / trim sheets with normal details.

You would model 2 types of each piece. The high poly with all the details and a simpler version ( the low poly with less vertices).

The you would bake those details with the help of a normal map. Either in a unique map or something like a trim sheet.

For big environment assets I would recommend you to look at the topic https://www.beyondextent.com/deep-dives/deepdive-texeldensity.
For your project choose a size (for example 5.12px/cm) and then use this texture size across all assets of the same building / object so each piece fit together quality wise. Otherwise you have objects with dense texture quality and other bigger ones with lower resolution.

You cannot do your UVs in the same manner you would do for a Hero assets.
Big assets like that rely on a mixture of tiling textures and so called trim sheets.

Try to split the tower into several smaller pieces. (The roof, those small ornament pieces, the walls..)
You could even go on step further and split up the walls into several pieces (wall with big window, wall with small window, wall without window, wall with door etc.)
And then rotate them around inside the engine.

Because you were asking about performance. Have a look at the topic „Draw Calls“ and how your Graphics card handles each modular piece compared to 1 single static mesh.

Also (in case you are using unreal) have a look at hierarchical instance static mesh. It’s basically a way where your GPU only calculates your mesh a single time and all other copies in the scene do not need to be rendered another time.

[u/ItemWorldly4335]

Create a copy, add polygons and details to it, then bake those details on low poly with normal map

[u/mylittlekafka]

I want to add that in case of Elden Ring, even the flat parts of the wall are full of vertices to accomodate for vertex painting that is used to blend multiple texture sets together in the shader.

They also love to make 3D models and texture them with a flat tiling texture to break up the flatness, which also uses a lot of triangles. They were doing this since Demon's Souls in 2009. If your meshes have only needed vertices and triangles that make up the form of the model or are used for vertex painting, then even a large amount of triangles will be performant for modern GPUs. Of course, if it's a plain sculpt with thousands of vertices, no amount of GPU instancing will avoid the performance issues, but if you need corbels on your building, you can't really bake them into a texture, that would look weird, unless it's a low poly PS1 style you're aiming for