Do low poly quads have to be equal?
polycounter lvl 2
Hi there, Just curious I have seen a lot of models recently showing their wireframe and its equal in quads. For games is that a must. Even if the asset is not meant for animation? Ive been told by others that its about capturing the silhouette for baking purposes and not actually the size of the quads. Also you are able to have tris in certain areas as long as they are small? Just wondering if I can have people's opinions on this? It seems to differ from people I talk to.
Thank you :)
Replies
in games, in the end everything is triangulated. quadonly doesnt exist in games, definitely not on the lowpoly.
When modeling for games everything will be converted to tris when you send it to the engine (or you may even triangulate it yourself for baking), so there is no reason to keep all quads. For characters I don't really know how it works but I guess you'll need proper topology in places that can deform. For hard surface assets and things that are not meant to be animated however you want the minimum amount of triangles while keeping a smooth silhouette, so it is common to have small triangles on rounded parts and corners.
Take a look at this for example, notice how flat surfaces have basically no geometry, but rounded corners have lots of small triangles in order to keep the silhouette smooth.
Nope, low poly meshes don't have to have quads equal in size. While it's a neat looking practice it's not usually needed per se. Instead traditionally you'd rather wanna optimize it so that you only have detail where you need it. One use case where some more even vertex distribution would be needed for static meshes is in the case of vertex painting. Good topology is always easier to work with but it doesn't have to be even.
As for tris, you can also use them. All quads are seen as triangles in the end anyway. You might wanna avoid long thin triangles though to avoid ugly smoothing and some performance considerations. With automatic decimation you often end up with them though so you see it a lot. In theory GPUs might struggle rendering them, especially from further away. This you'd usually avoid though with good LODs.
Thank you this was really insightful! Thank you so much for the response :)
One question with these models. To create this kind of topology what techniques are used? Does everyone use Quad draw or is there other methods? I know tools like Zremesh can give really strange edgeloops and can put more geometry where its not needed.
for something as precise as shown on that gun image, its usually built from the basemesh which is used to create the highpoly, or created with retopo on top. zremesher isnt there yet for anything precise. it's there to make some sculptable meshes, but i don't think its production ready past this idea.
that being said, some uninportant backgroundprops or if you use something like nanite for environmentpieces (say rocks, treetrunks, organic stuff) it would possibly be okay to use.