Boolean low poly geomtry - is this acceptable?

Sloth_42

Hello Ladies and gentlemen. This is my first post here and the tech section seemed appropriate so Im posting this here - hope thats right. Ive heard many good things about Polycount, so I hope you can help me out.

Im currently working on a 1959 radio and decided to not just model the exterior, but also the entire interior mechanism. Im hoping to share my WIP's soon in the Crit section. Until then however, Ive run across a few technical issues I'd love to hear your oppinion on. 

The project is very boolean heavy, and Im wondering - is what you see below acceptable low poly geometry? Will someone look at this in my portfolio and say - "I dont like this, it looks too messy". Note that there are no N-gons or concave faces, just quads and tris. LP was remodelled by hand - no mesh cleanup used.

Hoping to hear from you  

Kanni3d

For your low res, it's acceptable, but you'd still want to avoid having a couple of things that could cause uv/baking issues. 

You'd wanna avoid having a certain triangulation in your mesh that creates an obtuse angled polygon.

For instance, if you were to remove the highlighted edge that you've correctly got there, you'd create this issue which is possibly elsewhere on your mesh. It can easily be solved by connected these two verts (the dotted blue line) to prevent this polygon from being inverted/obtuse.

 Also wanna make sure you don't have any extremely clustered, narrow triangles. This usually comes up because of a bunch of rounded details across large distances, and there's no other nearby or acceptable vertices to connect those details to. So in these sorta situations, it's totally worth just adding an extra cut/triangle to prevent this from happening.

Sloth_42

Awesome feedback dude! I'll get to it. And you're right, I do have a lot of narrow triangle edges on the top side of the mesh that need fixing, so it seems I wont get around adding more geo/edges. Cheers

PS: If I have more technical questions regarding this same project, I assume Id have to make a post in the 3D crit section (for ongoing stuff) instead of starting a new topic for every little issue in the tech forum. Is that about right? 

👍

Kanni3d

Yeah I believe it's a good idea to refrain from making a topic about every small thing since there's so much of a wealth of knowledge already in this board + other threads. You could always bump this same thread/topic with another issue since it's somewhat relevant to the same project your working on.

 I think the consensus is make a topic for an issue if you've really exhausted google, polycount, youtube etc for your issue :P 

Feel free to give me a PM if you need generally need help though!

Sloth_42

Kanni3d said:

Yeah I believe it's a good idea to refrain from making a topic about every small thing since there's so much of a wealth of knowledge already in this board + other threads. You could always bump this same thread/topic with another issue since it's somewhat relevant to the same project your working on.

 I think the consensus is make a topic for an issue if you've really exhausted google, polycount, youtube etc for your issue :P 

Feel free to give me a PM if you need generally need help though!

Decided to put your feedback to good use and remodelled quite a lot of the low poly. Added more support geometry to decrease narrow edges and give it an overall cleaner look. I gave it a bit of thought and came to the conclusion that this is one of the biggest parts of the entire model, so the 200-300 extra tris I put into it are barely noteworthy.

Also did a test bake with a slap-on texture (needed a cage unfortunately). Came out ok but not 100% happy with it yet (wavy bake around the hole edges).

poopipe

That'll work

In general renderers are happiest when presented with an even distribution of nice square quads

Usually anything you can do to make your  mesh look more like that is worth the extra tricount 

saophaisoan00p

Hi, 

I just found a free script for maya recently. And I think it helps you. 
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/P1kY/mel-fan-connect-script?utm_source=artstation&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=homepage&utm_term=marketplace

Sloth_42

saophaisoan00p said:

Hi, 

I just found a free script for maya recently. And I think it helps you. 
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/P1kY/mel-fan-connect-script?utm_source=artstation&utm_medium=referral&utm_campaign=homepage&utm_term=marketplace

Thanks for that, Ill give it a shot! Ive never used scripts or plgins in maya because I wanted to master it vanilla first, but it looks like the time has come 

Sloth_42

Coming back with another quick question, not gonna make a new thread for it.

My model has a ton of tiny details and isnt very large overall. During a test bake I noticed my texel density for one of the screws is a bit low so is it acceptable to increase the TD for a select few parts that would otherwise seem too low res?

Whats your oppinion on hero assets? Can heroe assets have a highter TD than the rest of the scene?

Cheers