[3ds Max] Why can't I weld these edges together?

Nightingale

I need to weld together three triangles in a sort of bill-board way. This bill-board will be replicated thousands of times on all sorts of foliage.

I've tried welding the vertices one by one. I've tried welding the edges. I've tried collapsing the vertices. I've tried collapsing the edges. None of them work. They either refuse to weld, or they just make the entire mesh disappear altogether.

I don't know why it's not letting me weld these together. Please help.

Obscura

The short answer is that because the edge that you want to weld is not on the side of this polygon.Its inside it, so welding them is not possible. You can do this only with the edges that are on the side of a polygon.If you really want them together, scale their verticles close the each other.

Mark Dygert

Because you can only weld open edges. You could snap one to the other but you'll never be able to join one to the other unless they are both open.

Nightingale

Oh, so is it simply impossible to have all of the vertices there welded all nice together? There's nothing I can do to perfectly optimize these triangles?

How to vegetation artists typically create their billboards?

I am only trying to do this to optimize the mesh, as it will be rendered thousands of times in my level.

Obscura

"Open"...Damn, thats how I should have write The PC Wiki have good tutorials about the vegetations btw.

spacefrog

If you really want to weld this edge ( which apparently belongs to two polys with the normal in the opposite directions ), you can use an Edit Mesh modifier. Edit Mesh allows the vertices to weld.
As soon as you place a Edit Poly on top of that , it will split the shared edge of those polys again

As simply billboard does not require that much editing anyway, it would make sense to keep working in edit mesh, is this is a smaller data structure internally, and is faster to display, manipulate and handle in general, when you are using lots of those billboards