Unity RPG (working title)

Before making characters for my RPG, I wanted to know how many triangles a character should actually have. Here’s what I found. Some figures are confirmed and some are only estimates, and I’ve kept them separate.

Confirmed or well sourced:

• Old School RuneScape: around 500 triangles per character. Proof that style matters more than polycount.
• Overwatch: a Blizzard tech artist has confirmed about 30,000 triangles per hero plus 15,000 for weapons, with 4 LOD levels that each halve the count.

Estimates (no official numbers):

• Classic WoW models are reportedly roughly 1,000 to 6,000 triangles, with modern ones much higher.
• Valorant, CS:GO and RuneScape: Dragonwilds don’t publish numbers. Comparable games suggest anywhere from 10,000 to 40,000.

What I’m taking from this:

1. Pick a budget per art style, not per “quality”. A stylised game can look great at a fraction of the triangles.
2. Budget body and weapons separately. Overwatch’s split makes sense when characters can swap gear.
3. Plan LODs from the start. Halving at each LOD level is simple and scales well when lots of players are on screen, which matters for a WoW-style game.

My plan is a fixed body budget, a separate weapon budget and halving LOD levels, then testing in Unity to see where performance actually starts to drop.

I’m working on a WoW-style RPG in Unity: multiple races and classes, a skill tree, and combat that keeps moving. That needs a lot of 3D assets, so I looked into AI text-to-3D tools.

The short answer for my PC: not locally. I’m on an RTX 2060 with 6GB of VRAM.

• Hunyuan3D 2.1 needs around 10GB just for shapes and over 20GB with texturing.
• TRELLIS wants a 16GB+ card.
• Lighter options like Hunyuan3D-2mini or TripoSR might run, but expect rough, untextured results and a lot of fiddling.

What I’m doing instead:

1. Hunyuan3D’s official web version for props like weapons, crates and trees. It’s free, with daily generations at full quality.
2. Meshy’s free tier for characters, because it can auto-rig, which matters when you need many races to test.
3. Text-to-image first, then image-to-3D, which gives more control over the style than prompting for 3D directly.

Whatever the tool, the output is a starting point. Expect to fix topology and UVs before anything is game-ready.

As a test, I also had a simple low-poly human generated with a Python script: about 530 triangles, 1.8m tall, exported as GLB and OBJ so it drops straight into Unity at the right scale. It’s a base mesh for blocking out characters, not final art.

If I upgrade, a 16GB card would open up local generation. For now, cloud tools it is.

I’ve started work on an RPG in Unity, inspired by World of Warcraft. Here’s what I’m aiming for.

Races and classes. Players pick from multiple playable races and classes, each with its own abilities. I want the choice to feel meaningful from the start, not just cosmetic.

A skill tree. Characters grow through a skill tree, so two players of the same class can still end up playing differently.

Combat that keeps moving. Combat mixes melee, ranged and magic. The main goal is for it to stay fluid while you’re on the move, instead of locking you in place every time you attack or cast.

The camera. The camera sits slightly behind and above your character in third person, and you can zoom all the way into first person, the way WoW does. Some players like seeing their character and some like being in the action, so both should work.

I’ll post updates here as it takes shape.