How long is a piece of string

[John B]

I know this is a bit of a how long is piece of string question, but has
anyone got any very ball park guides for the number of faces you can have in
scene and still retain reasonable smooth motion if your authoring for the
internet public in general. Maybe you even have two levels of detail one for
peolpe using hardware rendering and one for those using software rendering.

Or maybe coming at it from a differnet angle is there anykind of unspoken
standards as a base spec, (similar to how most web designers presume a
certain screen resolution, color depth and browser level).

Would be interesting to hear the sought of numbers you generally aim for
when modelling.

Regards,

John.

[necromanthus]

ShockWave 3D engine is able to deal with over 50.000 polygons, BUT ...
To get a decent frame rate,no more than 10.000 !
Also pay attention to the number of textures (shaders), the number of lights
(3 or 4 lights are enough) and (of course) to the amount of LINGO.
p.s.
Don't try to find the "universal solution" for a particular case !