A more efficient way to have holes in cubes?

Danface

Hey guys, 

I'm trying to follow this reference: 

And I'm trying to think of the best way to create the red lined holes in my geometry. If it was to be a single plane, then I could easily create them as an alpha in the texture but I want the holes to appear with depth. 

This is what I've got so far:


I would very much like any info or tips if anyone knows how to do this with as little extra geometry as possible. It may just be the case that this is the most efficient method but I would hope not

sprunghunt

you don't need to box in the holes like that - it creates a lot of small polygons which won't draw as fast. Something like this is better in my experience:

poopipe

Boxing them in is preferable.

It results in more triangles overall but they aren't long and thin (which is wasteful in terms of rendering effort) 

Alex_J

If you don't need to actually be able to see through the holes, you can just use a height brush in Substance Painter, or similar in Photoshop. 

The way you did it is the way I'd do it, but at the end, after you've built everything else on the model, you can take all those long running edges and weld them off to the corners to get rid of extra geo. Basically any vertex that isn't holding shape can get tucked away into one that is. 

Danface

Thanks for the reply guys.

I ended up with this, which I feel is much cleaner and easier to work with. Plus it's about 900 triangles less than the original one.