Welding vertices, faces, complete meshes best practice?

Paulky45

Hey all. I'm just looking for some general advice on modelling technique and best practice. I'm relatively new to this, but not a complete beginner. I model mainly for games (using Unity), but this is more general advice I'm looking for.

I was just wondering what the best practice is for having complete meshes, with every face welded, etc. Here's a quick image of something I'm working on as an example.




( http://s24.postimg.org/quyp3k5yd/Houseimage.png - the image embed isn't working in the Preview for this so here's the link just in case)

In the leftmost red circle there are separate objects I arrayed for the guide rail, so they're sitting on top of the platform, not directly part of it.
The right most red circle I've highlighted has three supports for the overhanging part of the building. They were extruded out from the wall behind, so the overhanging bit is resting on them (i.e., the bottom poly of the overhang is not attached to the supports)



My understanding is that a complete mesh is preferable. So all these things should be connected to whatever it's near, polys should be removed where they can't be seen and then attached and welded to the rest of the mesh (eg, the top and bottom polys of each guide rail, or the top poly of the four overhang supports).


So basically what I'm saying is, am I being lazy by not doing all that, or being too anal by worrying about it? My instinct is that it's an awful lot of extra fiddlely work that mostly will never be seen, but I'm worried it could lead to problems down the line that I'm not aware of.

/edit: I'm using 3DS Max by the way, though that mightn't matter.

passerby

really just remove polys on hte back of things that cant be seen, there is no real advtange to welding everythign up, so if it makes sense in a circumstance to use multiple pieaces, just use multiple pieaces.

Tadao215

I think its fine the way you have it. if you want to delete unseen faces and weld points to create a contiguous model, then i think you might end up creating even more polygons just by trying to do that.

Paulky45

Cool, that makes sense to me. Thanks for the advice.

Paulky45

Hope it's not taboo to resurrect one of my old threads for this question, but it's on a similar theme and I can use the same example.

( http://s24.postimg.org/quyp3k5yd/Houseimage.png )

What about ngons in situations like this? You can probably see from around a lot of the windows and doors that a lot of the larger wall polygons are ngons - is this ok? I've been doing mostly character modeling lately and I understand the need to avoid ngons in those situations for subdivision and deformation, but for flat surfaces here that won't be moving at all, is it alright?

Same kind of issue as before with the complete mesh question, seems like I'd just be adding a lot extra polys all round to get rid of the ngons with no gain to the actual model, because the surfaces will be remaining flat.

Again, this question is mainly with game engines like Unity in mind, but any advice welcome.

ahtiandr

I think every game engine will triangulate your model so you will get extra polys even if you leave your ngons.

Here is picture of how I would connect all these ngongs

Noors

You have to get that every polygons is made of triangles even if the software doesn't show it.
Which means, if you triangulate a ngon, it won't have any impact on triangle count.
The only way to reduce tri count is to remove vertices.
Now for your model, as it's a flat surface, it won't be really a problem to let ngons as the exporter/importer will triangulate everything. I prefer to triangulate manually though, as sometimes triangle could be created in a way you don't want.
However, you can optimize this a bit by removing (welding) vertices, at the corner of the roof, under the windows etc...

Paulky45

Thanks guys. You've both pretty much confirmed what I was thinking, but I wanted to be sure. This is just for my own stuff at the moment, but if I was working on things for other people or paid jobs, I don't want to be making obvious errors.