Low Poly Critique Help

skyline5gtr

Hey all, so i recently did a small test of taking an mp5 i modeled and aiming for a 500 vert goal. I can up with this at 900. He said that i still have too many edges, can anyone help enlighten me how you can get so low without sacrificing the overall shape

ClusterOne

Its hard to say for sure given that you only showed it from one angle and I know as little about guns as you can imagine but some areas appear incredibly dense yet offer no visible silhouette change. I whipped together a brief draw over. If you can stand my horrendous handwriting and drawing skills, hopefully it'll help some. It doesn't cover everything but it should give you an idea.



I noticed you have a lot of unnecessary quads on the lower receiver which you could probably replace with fewer tris without affecting the silhouette at all. It's also worth considering which areas are going to be closest to the player/viewer and base the density of your geometry on that.

skyline5gtr

Ha, hand writing is better then mine. I thought triangles were bad and you want to stick to quads ?

billymcguffin

Whether to use only quads or not depends on the situation. Is the model going to deform? Sometimes triangles can cause weird deformation. Is the model lowpoly? Low poly models get reduced to tris in engine anyway so it really doesn't matter if you use some tris or all quads (though obviously you use the method that uses the fewest tris while maintaining the form). Is the surface flat? Even in a high poly sub-d model, you can usually have whatever kind of crap topology you want as long as the surface is flat.

skyline5gtr

Well, S***. I was so use to always building in quads i never really thought to just cut and connect verts to triangles wherever possible

Tobbo

If it's the final mesh you can have triangles. In fact, you should triangulate your final low poly mesh before you bake your maps.

But you want to avoid triangles on your high poly mesh because triangles cause terrible pinching on models that are subdivided. Plus it makes it nearly impossible to continue working in a sub-d workflow with triangles in your mesh.

But you should terminate unnecessary edge loops with triangles on your final low poly mesh.

skyline5gtr

Well , I learndededed . Thanks all