Meshsmooth or Turbosmooth

brianmac90

Hello,

I'm starting to make my models for a game environment I am creating in UDK. I would like to keep the poly-count on each model relatively low. Mesh smooth seems to give me better results with a lower poly-count. Is there any technical reason that I shouldn't use mesh-smooth and use turbo-smooth instead?

Obscura

You shouldn't use any of these in a game engine. You should use them only on your highpoly models that you use to bake normalmaps to your lowpoly meshes later.

brianmac90

Oh Ok thanks for replying. So do people use smoothing modifiers (collapsed) at all for game engines? One of the models is a cylindrical hut/house I dont know that I will get the results needed with just my normals and specular.

peanut™

brianmac90 wrote: »

Oh Ok thanks for replying. So do people use smoothing modifiers (collapsed) at all for game engines? One of the models is a cylindrical hut/house I dont know that I will get the results needed with just my normals and specular.

In the past Meshsmooth was used a whole lot more, this was before they made a new modifier called turbosmooth. Turbosmooth will give you better result with heavy meshes than meshsmooth. Overall they react the same but turbo is a notch better for extremely large scene.

However none of the two will be of any help for game engine like UDK. People will tend to want lower Polycounts in game engines for realtime playing. Send them in zbrush instead.

brianmac90

Ok thank you. I guess it will about trial and error until I achieve the correct results for real time playing in UDK. I know poly-count limit can vary depending on a number of variables. Thanks for the quick feedback better response time than most forums.

Moosebish

Turbosmooth and Mesh smooth are typically used to create nice high quality models to bake maps from for the low poly version.

The high poly (turbosmoothed/mesh smoothed) version will never be used in game. Only the final version of the low poly with the different maps as textures.

peanut™

http://www.aversis.be/tutorials/vRay/index.htm

I agree with the above. If you still want to use meshshooth/turbosmooth use them in Vray, which is a render engine and is made for those two.

brianmac90

How low poly are we talking? Its probably too general a question. Buts lets say I have a low-poly character model which I am going to bring into zbrush and put detail into. Whats my limit for an engine like UDK? Im looking for a general estimate because I know its a vague question.

ZacD

The only hard limits for UDK are
StaticMesh: 65535 ( 16 bit index) vertexes
SkelMesh : 4,294,967,295 ( 32 bit index) vertexes

45k tris seems to be normal for "next-gen" characters.

brianmac90

For instance I have a very basic shape for my hut which is 334 polys and I wanted to put the mesh smooth to smooth out the hard edges that brings it to 1,500 polys. Then I wanted to collapse the stack and bring it into z-brush. Is 1,500 poly model too much for low-poly???

brianmac90

ZacD wrote: »

The only hard limits for UDK are
StaticMesh: 65535 ( 16 bit index) vertexes
SkelMesh : 4,294,967,295 ( 32 bit index) vertexes

45k tris seems to be normal for "next-gen" characters.

OK cool. It gives me a bit more room then I thought. Thanks

ZacD

Normally, you want to have complete control of your low poly mesh, this is what people are actually going to be seeing, and where optimization really matters. So people will model the low poly mesh without smoothing it later. This gives that artist more control, and they can make sure they are wasting any polygons or edge loops.

brianmac90

ZacD wrote: »

Normally, you want to have complete control of your low poly mesh, this is what people are actually going to be seeing, and where optimization really matters. So people will model the low poly mesh without smoothing it later. This gives that artist more control, and they can make sure they are wasting any polygons or edge loops.

Good point I will take this into consideration.:)

cptSwing

Meshsmooth, however, allows for subobject-only subdivision. Not sure whether anybody actually makes use of this, though (when I moved to max, turbosmooth was the standard already)..