 So you have made your decision. You are gonna learn 3D. Not a problem. Now, your style really isn't something that you should worry about, but it is something that you should keep in mind so that you have a general sense of what direction you are building your experience. Your modeling style is a mix between your poly count and your artistic preferences. But in this video, we are just gonna cover poly count and the differences between. So just to be clear, if you were learning 3D modeling in order to become a professional or you have no idea what your art style is, I would follow Godfather Guru's advice and go for a photo-realistic high poly art style. That being said, for those of you who are doing this for fun, if you just love making things and you're not super concerned with being hired, you just wanna create something awesome and you are okay with the idea of practicing and improving your art over time. If this is you, then you are in the right place. But you have to understand that your modeling style is usually not something that you learn. It's something you find and you find it by balancing what you really want with how much time you can afford to spend. Have you ever noticed that the cover art for a manga or an anime is almost always super different from the way it's drawn in the story? Like even if it's the same guy drawing everything. Well, the reason for that is when you are creating the project, you don't have time to make every single frame as good as your imagination. If you have four days to draw 500 frames, well, then you simply can't afford an art style that takes 12 hours for one frame. So generally what you would do is say, okay, I have four days, I can work six hours a day, maybe eight if my lady friend isn't feeling lonely. So that gives me 24 hours to make 500 frames, which basically means that each frame has to be drawn in three minutes. So whatever the best you can do in three minutes is, that becomes your art style. And this concept is just as important in 3D as it is in 2D. Modeling basically falls into three categories. Low poly, mid poly, and high poly. And they have very different strengths, very different weaknesses and are used for very different reasons. And which one you pick is gonna determine how big your projects can be and how long they are gonna take. Low poly is the stuff you see from the first Star Fox, Mario 64, Zelda Ocarina of Time. This is the stuff where the main character has a poly count of about 300 faces. Now, you are not gonna wow anyone with your low poly graphics, but you can make giant projects very quickly. And as long as you have a charm in art style, a nice shader, and fluid animation, it's probably one of the best choices for a small team, especially if you're doing mobile games. Mid poly is the stuff that you start to see around the GameCube, PlayStation 2, and original Xbox era. Character models for these projects generally had somewhere between 1,000 and 10,000 polygon. It takes a little bit more work than low poly, but what's great about this style is it looks noticeably better while still keeping the poly count modest. But what makes this style so powerful is your ability to give the illusion that your mid poly work is actually high poly. And you can do this with amazing texture and bump maps. High poly is generally anything beyond 20,000 faces. Pretty much every triple A game and movie that came after Call of Duty 4 dances somewhere around the high poly area. The pros to this style are, it looks amazing. Then people are probably willing to look at your project even if everything else about it is meh. The cons are it takes a lot of fucking time. You need very powerful computers to render it, and everyone is gonna scrutinize every little detail that isn't perfected. It's a high risk, high reward art style. So when you are deciding to poly count for your project, then think about the style that's gonna give your team the most mileage. Obviously, if you have unlimited resources in time, high poly is probably the one that everyone imagines for their project. But if your project is really big and your team is really small, photo realism might not be feasible without scaling down. And that is where mid and low poly styles shine. Remember, low poly art styles allow small teams to make big worlds. Let's assume that you're part of a standard three person team working on an indie game. You got one programmer, one sound guy, and you, the modeler slash animator. If you guys want your project to look like the remake of Final Fantasy 7, assuming all three of you are professional and know what you're doing, modeling, UVing, and texturing the character, it's probably gonna take about a week or two. Rigging, weight painting, and completing all the animations for that character, it's probably gonna take another two or three weeks. All right, now you gotta do that for every single character. Let's pretend your entire game only has seven characters, which is super unrealistic because games usually have things like NPCs, enemies, bosses, but whatever. Let's just say that you only need to do seven for the entire game. So five months later, you finally got all the characters modeled and animated. Now you have to make all the environment. Now you have to add special effects and particles to your animations. You gotta put in the water, maybe some clouds, fix the lighting. What about the trees? What about the mountains in the background? Did anyone write the story yet? Did we find voice actors? Have they even been recorded yet? Because if not, you can't finish any talking animations. What about the sound effects? Is the music guy still alive? Or did he starve to death while we were modeling our characters? You can see how even a small project in high poly could easily eat years of your time. And that's assuming you already know how to do this stuff. But everything changes if you scale down the poly. If you are doing low poly, you could make seven characters a week. Do some quick rigging, slap on some motion capture, and have all the characters animated the next week. And now you have five extra months to build that world. Fix the dialogue, find the perfect lighting for each area, whatever. As long as you have a charm and art style with good texture maps and a nice shader, a lot of people probably won't even care that it's mid or low poly. And that brings me to my final and probably most important point, your art style. The poly count might control how fast you can work, but your style is ultimately what controls how good it looks. Low poly can look awesome if you have a beautiful style. Likewise, just because something has two million faces does not mean it looks good. The same way that there are thousands of different ways to draw anime, there are thousands of different ways to model. And the trick is to find a way to compliment your poly count with your art style, which we will talk about in the next video. Anyway, hope that helps. Please don't forget to ring that bell. Otherwise you will never know when I upload new stuff. And as always, hope you have a fantastic day and I'll see you around.