Topology in curved flat meshes?

wandering_snail

Hello, so I have this model:


I have been trying to think of ways to do the topology here but I can't really come up with something that is very clean and I'm not sure how it's supposed to be done. I tried to google it but no luck.
Does anyone know what sort of workflow I'm supposed to use?
Thank you in advance!

Neox

what is the purpose of this mish? is this going to be a highpoly? is it a lowpoly?

wandering_snail

Neox said:

what is the purpose of this mish? is this going to be a highpoly? is it a lowpoly?

It's a low poly and then I will bake the high poly textures into it.

Vexod14

I'd suggest to avoid flat surface vertices as much as possible, the only "rule" that would allow to let a little vertex in the middle of a flat surface would be "avoid tiny-long triangles", else, there's no need to put vertices in the middle of a flat surface

poopipe

Yes.
It's better to run edges across the surface than to create a pole in the middle. 

From a rendering perspective one of the least efficient things you can do is have more than one triangle in a screen pixel(technically 2*2 pixels if we're being picky). Poles and thin triangles make that happen so they should be avoided. 

However.  When you're dealing with top lods it's not really a big deal in sensible cases. If you're close enough to see a top Lod it's probably obscuring thousands of background triangles so you can afford for it to be a bit inefficient if that means you get the appearance you're looking for.

wandering_snail

Thank you everyone! I have connected the vertexes on opposite sides and I think it kind of works. I have some triangles in parts because the number of vertices didn't match but it will probably be fine.

Eric Chadwick

Game models are always all triangles in the end. We use quads in authoring just to make things easier. But in-game it's always triangles.