I made fences and trees for my game but each one of these are about 10-15k vertices. Is it too much? If it is, how can I reduce it? (I have a lot of fences in my level, and a lot of trees…)
Hi, yeah 10-15k for fences is a lot also depends on the complexity.
Not sure if you already use normal maps and a low poly?
If not search for “Texture backing normal map”. With normal maps, you achieve a highpoly look with a low poly mesh.
There are a lot of great tutorials out there.
Hope that helps.
Must be around 2 or 3k verts, maybe 4k? 
Thank you for your help. I will model my own from now. 
Without having seen the actual fence in question I would say yes, this too much. I don’t know how big your segments are but there are very few fences existing in the real world that I would consider to need this kind of vert count, even for an ultra-realistic look.
As for reducing the vert counts, what detail are you trying to bring out? Things like crookedness or roughness and gaps can be easily reproduced via bump maps/height maps/normal maos like the guy above me suggested.
Any info you can give on the actual mesh make it a lot easier to offer help
Interesting. I can think of no logical reason why that would require that vert count.
As a counter example, here’s a lantern with meshed sides I am using in my game:
It’s the closest example I had to something consisting of meshed screens that I am currently using. Would you care to guess the vert count on it? Bear in mind I haven’t added a normal map to this yet, it’s just a simple painted texture.
748 - Cheating a bit by softening edges etc, but in comparison to your fence I’d say it should have somewhere in the area the same amount of mesh geometry. And even this is kinda heavy for something small like this cheap little prop for lighting.
The thing about models off the internet is that they’re quite often very heavy because they’re not really meant for use in games, or they’re showpieces where the creator simply piled on to highlight his skills. And more often than not they have horrible topology. For example, if you were to grab a character model off a random website for 3d models it would most likely have hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of faces and a ton of triangles (you want quads for a mesh that’s going to deform via animation for example).
My advice is use the models as a reference to create your own pieces. That fence you got up there doesn’t need to be super-high quality at all. In fact I’d say you’d get away with having each bar simply be a scaled, 6 sided cube (like a dice). Softening the edges on it means the player would need to be basically pressing their eyeball up against the thing before they’d notice it was somewhat square.
Here’s a picture of the topology of the lantern, so you can get an idea of how these things can look:
No problem. On objects like that you can be really stingy with your vert count as it would be virtually impossible for the player to notice the iron bars are actually just square. Even if you made them somewhat round, say 6 vertical edges instead of 4, you should be able to recreate that with at least 5x savings, potentially more.
Actually find this kind of thing interesting so I went ahead and remade it just for fun:
740 - I think it’s a bit bigger than your original one though.
I made one mistake and that was to not fix up the UVs before I started copying the original cube out after bending the top, so it might have some weirdness with UVs. But here’s a picture of the thing in UE4 with the starter content chrome material applied:
I’ll include the maya and fbx files which you should be able to open in blender yourself. If you want to assign a different material to the sides for example, the mesh isn’t actually connected by verts to each other so just select the faces and use select new material.
Fbx: https://ufile.io/o8m3k
Maya LT file: https://ufile.io/lraom
Just gonna bump this gently to make sure you saw the model and can grab it before the link expires.
I am really sorry to didnt see that! Thanks for your link. Maybe I missed that but I felt very happy because of your thinking. Sorry and thanks again