I was really often asked about "what is polygon budget?", or "how many drawcalls is acceptable?", and others like this.
It's not an easy question, the answer depends from a lot of different things - rendering pipeline, target platform/hardware, target framerate, space for future optimization.
Let me introduce the solution. Ok, it's just a concept of possible solution.
Imagine, you have a simple app, which only allows you to import 3d model, and see it's rendering weight as a single value.
This value should be calculated for some standard, generic settings.
If you want, you can choose other settings from preset, or make a unique preset, which includes all the settings important for you.
So, the workflow is:
Marketing specialist decides the product audience, platforms, supported devices.
Developer chooses/creates the config, which includes: supported devices, OS versions, rendering pipeline, lighting settings, etc.
This config becomes a measurement "module" for the whole project. For example: whole scene should have a weight of 1000 units, 300 for characters, 300 for main gameplay objects, 200 for props, 200 for location geometry. From this, the forest around should have a weight of 100 units. The forest consists of 150 trees, so, one single tree should have a weight of 0.667 unit.
When 3d artist creates this tree, he can easily check the weight of the model, using exact project's weight measurement module.
After creating a bunch of models, its possible to check all them together, for example, getting the weight of all props in scene.
Of course, for better work, it should be implemented also as a plugin for most popular 3d design software.
What do you think? Is it possible? Would it be helpful in your work?