3ds Max and Edge Cleanup

Wolfer

Hi so I was wondering if I could get an opinion on something. When you finish your model and about to export it, is it a good idea to sometimes remove extra edges. Here I have an example incase I'm not clear. You see I have these two boxes next to each other and they have it where lots of edges to it.  Now if I wanted to export my object and keep the polycount low, would it be a good idea to see about removing some of the edges or faces that are inside the cube as it shown.  Also since the square has lots of edges, would taking out some extra edges on the face be a bad idea, of course i would make sure the polygon face still intact and look presentable.  You can see how in my example I removed some edges.

NoRank

Yeah, I mean why do you have edges that don't help in anything to maintain the shape?
The only reason to keep this kind of edges that I can think of is for vertex painting, tesselation or to get rid of long triangles (which I don't think is a problem in this example).

And it's ok to remove faces that won't be seen, they usually take away uv space for no reason as well.

Noors

Beware that removing edges like you did changes nothing to triangle count. It's just Max display. Internally it's the same.

You only optimize by removing vertices.

Michael Knubben

You're thinking in reverse.
Before you place any edges, you need to think: 'do I need these? Why am I adding them?'.
Given that these are just two boxes, I'd start over and practice keeping your polycount low from the start, because if you run into this issue on such a simple model, it'll happen on more complex ones as well - and be much harder to solve afterwards.