Ngons for assets in UE4?
vertex
Hello Polycount-Community,
I read that one should alwas model in polygons which are (automatically?) converted to tris upon implementation into an engine (f.e. UE4).
I also read, that the reason for that is
a) better animation possibilities
b) avoiding shading errors of ngons
Now lets say I have the back of chair with some curvy stuff around. If I just trace the outline with a path tool and then extrude it, I obviously have an ngon with 40 or more vertices on the front and back, and maybe 40 polys as ring (or edgeloop? not sure what the right term is here) around.
Is a model like that "game ready" or do I need to break the whole front and back into polys (with the cutting tool in 3dsmax or what?). That seems like a lot of work. Is that really necessary. If it is, is there a way to automate that?
Thanks,
Coffee
Replies
If it is just about applying a modifier it is probably not that much effort, right? Would you triangulate objects consisting of even polygons manually too? Or is that safe enough to be left as quads?
Or if you're lucky you could get away with it in-engine altogether, but that is poor practice imo.
If you add a 'turn to poly mod', check 'limit polygon size', set it to 3.
Now go down the stack to your base editable poly, enable 'show end result', edge sub-object selection, and use either 'edit tri' or 'turn' to change the way hidden edges are oriented. (Hidden edges are always there when you're working on any poly mesh, they show up as dashed lines) This will propogate up the stack and is how your mesh will be triangulated.
The normals of faces are the direction that they[triangles/faces/polygons] point in object/world space. A face is made up of at least 3 vertices and 3 edges, all with their own normal direction. So flipping a face is basically turning it 180degrees backward and is nothing to do with turning an edge. Think of it like turning it inside out. As a rule you always want the face normals of a contiguous surface pointing in the same direction. If they are not then the geometry will be 'broken'. Turning an edge simply means changing 1 or 2 of the verts that it is connected to, to neighbouring verts.
a) I cannot see the invisible edges (see first screenshot). Pressing F3/F4 doesn't change that. Neither does pressing the turn button. I can turn them without seeing them. The cursor changes when I move over it, but it is not dashed, just invisible. (3dsmax 2012)
Thx
Coffee
As for what I'm describing, a plane isn't a good example as it has no silhouette. You only need to worry about shading errors after you have triangulated the mesh. This is when you would need to go in and manually turn edges to relieve the artifacts. A good rule of thumb when turning edges is to always go for the shortest edge possible. This can help if you run into concave quads.
Another consideration is for cylindrical, and some curved shapes. You can sometimes get highlight skewing if the edges are all turned in the same direction.
I'll try to post some images with examples late as it's hard to explain.
Is that the same thing you mean? So I would only need to scrutinize the mesh for weird spots?
I also just tried to run meshsmooth/turbosmooth on a cylinder - that looked pretty awful too on the top. I suppose the whole thing is not that easy ...
Mesh/turbosmooth is another matter entirely. That is subdivisional modeling as opposed to polygonal modeling (what we'very been talking about) I highly recommend watching all the vids on that site as it breaks the fundamentals down as simply as is possible.
Thank you again for your time, Musashidan.