Lowest poly count always the best?

YannickStoot

Is it always better to close your model off?

I have been thinking of this question for quite a while now. It often costs polygons to do so and it can sometimes even cost you extra texture space. On the other hand. I have also seen some models perform poorly in light baking / shadowing due to this.

So I have this mirror prop. The back side can be modeled like this. Closing the shape completely.

115 polygons 

Or like this, the red line is where the model is open.

102 polygons

I know it is about verts and that max's poly counter is not representative of the real game performance but I want to ignore that for this discussion.