Smoothing groups not emoothing enough?

Digitalair

Hi all,

I've ran into a problem when working with the low poly version of this cone.

I've applied smoothing group value of 32 to the entire upper part of the cone, yet there are seems between the edges still.

Here's a render of the high poly version for your time.

billymcguffin

That's because you've got a lot of long thin triangles which tend to mess up shading. Can you post a wireframe shot of the lowpoly?

Steppenwolf

Add one or two loops to the cone to get shorter triangles.

Digitalair

Steppenwolf wrote: »

Add one or two loops to the cone to get shorter triangles.

That worked, thanks!

Quack!

This thread has the answers too.

You can add vertical loops like steppenwolf said, or you can bake a normal map.

http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=135895

EarthQuake

You can (and should) optimize a shape like this so the top doesn't have as many sides as the bottom, in this case the top should have no more than half the sides it does on the bottom, which means removing every other vertical edge, which will give you triangulation that matches the shape of the mesh closer.

Digitalair

EarthQuake wrote: »

You can (and should) optimize a shape like this so the top doesn't have as many sides as the bottom, in this case the top should have no more than half the sides it does on the bottom, which means removing every other vertical edge, which will give you triangulation that matches the shape of the mesh closer.

I've done that and the cone looks too low poly. The cone has 1300 polys atm, how is that?

EarthQuake

Post images of what you've done, even with half the edges on the top as you have on the bottom, it shouldn't look too lowpoly. You may have misunderstood and removed half of all the edges though? The number of sides should remain the same on the bottom, but be reduced on the top where the radius is much smaller.

The basic concept here is an even distribution of polygon density. The top of the cone has a radius about 1/4th the size of the bottom, so when you use the same amount of sides on the top as well as the bottom, the top is either over detailed, or the bottom is under detailed. For a prop this size 32 sides for the bottom is probably in the appropriate to too high range (see below), so that leaves us with one conclusion.

As far as how many triangles is appropriate, that's an unanswerable question. What engine? What hardware? What sort of game? How close can the player get to the cones? How many cones are in the scene? Do the cones have LOD meshes? What else is in the scene? How expensive are your ai/gameplay/animation/etc/etc/etc systems?

Generally your triangle counts will be dictated by your technical team, either a technical artist, engineer, or in some cases an art director or art lead. On modern hardware, triangle count isn't a huge limitation, however you still should make sure everything is optimized so you get the best use of your triangle budget, no matter what that budget is.