Fourteen thousand to twenty-six: where the triangles go

Nobody buys a character by weight. You buy it because it holds up at the distance it will be seen, in the number of copies it will be instanced. Those two constraints set the budget. The number is only what falls out of them.

The six pieces, and their counts

Sonde — 14,000 triangles

Broad forms, no micro-surface. Calibrated to stay readable at 64 pixels tall.

Veilleur — 18,000

Three masses: crown, jaw, nape. No separate parts.

Fauché — 19,000

A profile study: the density goes into the offset jaw and the cheek blade.

Suaire — 21,000

A riveted plate mask. Every plate is a hard edge, and a hard edge costs.

Ermite — 22,000

The drapery. Three large breaks of cloth, retopologised by hand.

Bramée — 26,000

The antlers. On their own, most of the gap with Sonde.

Twice the weight, between two pieces in the same series, sculpted by the same hand, at the same price. The gap does not measure fineness. It measures how much geometry the silhouette demands.

What costs, and what does not

Surface detail — rivets, stitching, grain, scratches — costs nothing in geometry. It lives in the normal map. What costs is whatever shows on the outline:

• open silhouettes — antlers, an antenna, a hood lifting away from the skull;
• hard edges, which force split vertices and make you pay for the same edge twice;
• curves seen close up, where undersampling reads as faceting;
• deformation, when a piece is meant to be rigged — though Flash pieces are static busts, so it does not arise here.

That is why Bramée weighs 26k and Sonde 14k. Antlers are pure silhouette: no texture stands in for them. Sonde's collar is a closed form that reads in four loops.

Budgets belong to scenes, not to models

One 26k bust on a plinth in a corridor is not a problem on any 2026 machine. The same bust instanced forty times across a chapter house is — and the problem is almost never the triangle count. It is draw calls and material switches.

Hence the choice, on every Flash, of a single material and one texture set. A piece with no separate parts draws in one call; forty instances share the same material. That is what makes the triangle count the secondary number.

The high-density case

A commission starts from a sculpt far denser than anything above: 90,000 quads, 8K textures. Two clarifications, because that number is routinely quoted badly.

First: one quad is two triangles. 90,000 quads is therefore about 180,000 triangles, and the triangle count is what an engine reads. Quoting quads without saying so doubles the number in the reader's head — a technical buyer spots it, and what they conclude is not flattering.

Second: at 180,000 triangles you have left the game behind. For scale, analysis of the Arkham Knight models puts a character around 150,000 polygons, against roughly 20,000 in Arkham Asylum — and Arkham Knight targeted the consoles of its day exclusively, with its own LODs. A high-density version therefore sits above a hero character from that game.

A studio that sold 180,000 triangles as game-ready would be making a saving on vocabulary that its client pays for, on integration day. The two meshes are two different objects, and they have two prices.

If the count does not suit you

The .blend ships with the piece, modifiers unapplied. Dropping a subdivision level, or decimating an area your scene never shows, takes minutes — that is what the source file is for, and it is more honest than shipping three LODs, two of which will not match your viewing distance.

Each piece states its exact count on its own sheet, next to texture resolution and the engines it was checked in. The catalogue is here.