At what point does low poly become high poly?

From a game development perspective, it's all relative to your project. In our current project, "low poly" characters are 15-40k polygons, which would have been considered high poly a few years ago. For mobile games, you may need to stay under 10k. Meanwhile, some AAA games with UE5's Nanite can handle much more. There's no universal number - it depends on your platform and requirements.

Think in terms of purpose rather than specific numbers. A low poly model is what you actually use in production - games, realtime rendering, etc. High poly is what you use to bake details from - this can be millions of polys. The whole point is to capture high resolution details in texture maps that your low poly model can use.

Here's a practical way to think about it:

For basic props (like a monitor):
- Low poly: 50-200 tris
- Mid poly: 200-1000 tris
- High poly: 1000+ tris

For characters:
- Low poly (mobile): 3k-10k
- Mid poly (modern games): 15k-50k
- High poly (baking): 100k-millions

But these are rough guidelines, not rules.

One practical consideration: try to UV unwrap anything over 10k polys. Pain in the neck! That's often what defines "low poly" for me - can I actually work efficiently with it? High poly is great for detail, but you need that optimized low poly for actual production use.

It all depends on what you're modelling. A simple cube could be low poly at 6 faces, while a detailed character could be considered low poly at 20k faces. It's all about the minimum number of polygons needed to effectively represent the shape. If you're doing a stylised low-poly look, it's different - you're deliberately using visible polygons as part of the aesthetic.

bruh just use nanite and forget about poly count 😎

Thanks everybody! So basically there's no fixed number - it depends on the project, the platform, and what you're actually modeling. Makes a lot more sense now!