Environment Capstone: Create the polygons, extrude the faces, or else?

vincentlee

Hello y'all!

I have a question while working on my capstone for school.

I'm working on buildings on the street, is it okay if I create new polygons and attach the assets (frames, windows, borders, etc) to each other?

I've heard that I need to avoid stacking and intersection because it will cause the z-fighting and the depth/transparency sorting issue.

I wonder if I need to extrude the faces at this point.

Thanks!

SpiderHearts

Depends on what you need it for. Is it possible to use a good texture or normal map for that?

vincentlee

SpiderHearts said:

Depends on what you need it for. Is it possible to use a good texture or normal map for that?

I'm pretty sure I can do both texture and normal map on the building, but I'm not sure about the streetlight one.

I hate combining and editing edges because it takes a lot of time.  

Eric Chadwick

Stacking is done all the time, no need to avoid it. Z fighting with nearby meshes is only a problem at the extremes... when the world extents are huge, or when you're running on low-end hardware (a phone for example, Playstation 2, Gameboy, etc.).

Alpha sorting is definitely still a problem to contend with, but only for meshes that use alpha in their material. None of your meshes need that. Windows maybe, if you have internal rooms (still rare in most games to see into an actual room from the outside), but anyhow the window would use its own material, so the window frames wouldn't have alpha.

I'm moving this to Technical Talk since this isn't really about Education, but about modeling tech.