What are good face guidelines?

[Cryocasm]

I'm fairly lost to be honest when it comes to polygon count on models..

What are good guidelines for 1m and 3m parts?

[EndlessWaves]

Like most games KSP only uses triangles and not higher order polygons so if you're using quads etc. remember to convert to tris before counting.

The guidelines posted by N3XIS on the wiki suggest low thousands for a cylinder-based parts, but the game isn't usually limited by that so if you need to use two or three times that I wouldn't worry.

[Technical Ben]

But 10 thousand might be over doing it. Although the game was fine with that OTT Shuttle engine.

[Cryocasm]

WELL THEN. This solves quite the bit of problems, as I've been looking at below 1000 for my work...

Thanks

[Xellith]

While reducing the tri's is great, the best thing to do is reduce the complexity of your mesh collider. If you just stick it in unity with a complex mesh then you are gonna have a bad time with framerate down the road.

[Cryocasm]

While reducing the tri's is great, the best thing to do is reduce the complexity of your mesh collider. If you just stick it in unity with a complex mesh then you are gonna have a bad time with framerate down the road.

KSP in itself calls for a node_collider, so this isn't of discussion. KSP even forbids and rejects all concave/convex colliders, meaning you can only have very simple Conical, Cylindrical, or Box-Shaped (possibly trapezoids) for colliders.

[Semni]

Generally when I am modeling I work with 24 side tubes on my 1m and 2m parts. You can argue that you can go with less on the 1m but with the 2m parts 24 is really the minimum on looking good. On small piping and such I typically work with six or eight sides, mesh smoothing will make that generally look good at even pretty close distances. Really, a good guideline is that if you can remove complexity in your model without making it look less complex you should and piping can go a very long way to making your model look complex and visually interesting without introducing a lot of tris. What really generates a lot of geometry are organic shapes, domes and irregular curves really eat into your tricount, avoid them whenever you can.

In general though it is pretty hard to go really overboard with tris, if you are really worried you can try out your model with an equivalent model of stock parts and take a look at framerates but as long as you pay some attention to your geometry you should be fine.

[MerlinsMaster]

What is a sensible poly count limit for IVAs?

[NecroBones]

KSP in itself calls for a node_collider, so this isn't of discussion. KSP even forbids and rejects all concave/convex colliders, meaning you can only have very simple Conical, Cylindrical, or Box-Shaped (possibly trapezoids) for colliders.

Just to clarify, colliders should be convex (saying it rejects both would mean nothing at all is acceptable). If I understood correctly, technically concave colliders can exist, but Unity 4 had a limitation that physics interactions required at least one of the colliders (in any collision between two colliders) to be convex. For Unity 5, they will all have to be convex. So it's best to stick to that anyway.

While the colliders individually need to be pretty simple, you can use combinations of them to get a slightly more complex shape. KSP allows for having more than one collider in your parts. However it's all a trade-off in terms of performance. More colliders means more CPU time.

[PB666]

While reducing the tri's is great, the best thing to do is reduce the complexity of your mesh collider. If you just stick it in unity with a complex mesh then you are gonna have a bad time with framerate down the road.

The critical issue in the design is to keep the convex points in th design low.

To give an exampl suppose i make an 800 sided cylinder . since the are 1600 triangles Unity is giong to make 3200 sided collision mesh = fail.

make the craft in blender such that you can easily extract a collision mesh that is 200 trigs or less (255 is limit). This will make more difference that anything. What i have found slows down the game alot are emmisive parts and parts with odd physicss, like panels and lights, ect.