[blender] regarding this mesh...

oraeles77

look at these two pictures...

i know its a simple question, but this sort of shit still really confuses me, all the early tutorial videos I learnt from years ago would do this loop cut technique to make things and Im not sure if its necessary,  as it creates extra polygons unnecessarily etc.

answers/suggestions please.

ant1fact

You don't have to model everything in one piece. I used to do it when I started out but it's a futile effort most of the time especially with static objects. Also if something consists of different parts in real life it's generally pretty safe to model them separately, too.

ant1fact

Of course, if you have a continuous piece, you want to avoid ngons eventually. In a game mesh you wouldn't have those nice straight edge loops for example. You would triangulate everything and get rid of unnecessary vertices that do not contribute to the shape of your object

Cathodeus

Having everything in one peace can reduce the fill rate, reduce chunks, reduce lightmap usage. So it can be good in some case. If you do it for a portfolio I will recon and to do not take care of it as long as you don’t show wires.

Cathodeus

As long as tesselation is not need for the project you work on than forget those long strips. Tesselation can be use for vertex color for example.

oraeles77

opps.

this was how I meant the first image to look!  please ignore the n-gon in the first one.

oraeles77

ant1fact said:

Of course, if you have a continuous piece, you want to avoid ngons eventually. In a game mesh you wouldn't have those nice straight edge loops for example. You would triangulate everything and get rid of unnecessary vertices that do not contribute to the shape of your object

yeah, ignore the first image with n-gon, I uploaded the wrong photo have a look at the one I just uploaded thats what I meant. Its all polys.

oraeles77

Cathodeus said:

Having everything in one peace can reduce the fill rate, reduce chunks, reduce lightmap usage. So it can be good in some case. If you do it for a portfolio I will recon and to do not take care of it as long as you don’t show wires.

what do you mean by wires?

Cathodeus

Wire = Wireframe 

Again, if the game or project do not use vertex color for lighting or something else than less triangles will always be better.

From what I learned In my career, it is better to not show wires on a screenshot as it is opening big useless discussions. NGON aren’t ok for Game Engine even if nowadays all exporter can handle it correct.

I still prefer controlling the way my edges are oriented.

Ps : If I had to hire you and you don’t know what is better on those two pictures good chance you will not get the job. But if you can answer and know why you used NGON than that’s fine.

Cathodeus

The two red faces are NGON too 

oraeles77

Cathodeus said:

The two red faces are NGON too 

not true they aren't. they were connected by selecting four vertices and filling. their edges aren't being lent/used by neighbouring polygons.

so just to clarify its all quads, in the below image.

but just to go back to what my original question was, when I first starting learning Blender back in 2013, there were loads of videos in youtube regarding loop cutting when making objects, and they would complicate the topic, they seemed to imply that for 'good geometry' all loops must run around the object, un broken, for example here, the roof is a completely seperated mesh. and to an extend the walls are seperated, the corner closest to the camera, the two walls only share 2 vertices together, at the top and the bottom.

the video tutorials which I used to learn from seemed to create really high poly counts becuase of continuously adding loop cuts, which may be useful on one side of the model but totally un-necessary on another side of the model.

does that make sense?

regarding your job offer, no thanks!

Cathodeus

Hum just to clarify I never proposed you a job ... I was trying to explain you that knowing why doing sometime weird things is good if you know why you do it.

it seems actually that you were fallowing a tutorial in a blind way. Wich is ok when starting learning. But knowing why doing this kind of split is useful (or not) is probably far more important, and the answer is not that simple.

Sometime it can be usefull to have tessellated walls like on your tutorial. Sometime tri count will be more important.

But what I know is that if you really do have all quads on your screenshot, than it is not good. ( for lighting, for model structure, etc ...)

You can have floating elements but they need to be structured in a logical way. For that you need to learn how a house is made in reality and forget about polygons.