Polygons aren't that costly, they're just a set of coordinates and pack up well and ultra expensive highpoly stuff is avoided wherever possible by proffessionals. It's mostly textures and maybe audio that bloats size.

[–] gens@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yea, textures are the biggest thing (unless there's video). But don't underestimate vertices, even when using strips. Unity, i think, just ships textures as BCn, meaning 1MB per 1k texture (would be 3-4MB raw). It's even better for the gpu then raw. Then there's normal maps, etc.

Another thing is lighting data, be it some textures, probes, or whatever. That can also take up plenty of space.

[–] endeavor@sopuli.xyz 2 points 2 days ago

I've mostly been told to use one 512 map max for lighting maps while textures I ship have a casual working file size of 5 gigs and above for substance painter. Idunno how well they get packaged up as since I haven't played any of the games I've worked on for a while. I can see vertice data taking up a lot but other than some AAA games I don't see why anyone would need to make super poly dense models.