Retopology question

Jimmito

Hi Guys, I know it's an idiot question, but I see some artists delete the cap edges of the cylinder and replace it with this shape on the right, my question here what makes difference between the 2 shapes? 

Yerus

Depends on the result you are trying to achieve. For games particularly, having many edges converging to one single vert is a bad thing, that's why the balls in game are made from a cube and not a sphere. The 1st one will lead you to a circular look in your model and all the future extrusions, the 2nd will aid you on implementing squary stuff upon the primitive.

RacePeaceDay

Because of this: http://www.fragmentbuffer.com/gpu-performance-for-game-artists/

Kanni3d

Count the triangles   Geometry, among other reasons stated 

Jimmito

Thank you Guys, you helped me a lot 

musashidan

This would be a the best topology in this case. The closer a triangle is to equilateral, the more optimal it is. Your second example would still be triangulated to similar shaped long tris as the fan topology.

FourtyNights

Capping the ends of cylinders in 2019 thinking about performance, lol. One of the feedbacks for artists in these days has been "use more geo" if their real-time 3D game asset work looks too blocky, low poly-ish and have wavy normal bakes, and when it comes to cylinders, it's mostly 16, 32 or 64 (or something between those) sided we use. I'm always using triangle fan caps at the end of cylinders for the sake of simplicity and cleanliness.

Also, the more sides you have on your cylinder (>64), the messier the other capping solutions get, like Musashidan's one above. Lot's of tiny and thin triangles = not good. And at the end you save only whopping 2-4 triangles. Not really worth it.

musashidan

@FourtyNights I use tri fans myself without issues. The example above was merely from a technical point of view, which OP seemed to want. However, even though we can throw a lot of verts around these days, we often only consider AAA and forget about the whole lower-end game dev end of things with strict restrictions, when advising on here.