poly/mesh question.

Amouro

i've been looking for information on this but i can't seem to find any. my question is, what is the difference between a editable poly and an editable mesh in 3ds max? and what should i use the two for?

Rick Stirling

Use epoly - it does everything Emesh does, but more, and gives you laods of new tools.

emesh is old, and will be killed off dead before long. i hope.

Detritus

here here, although alot of 3rd party tools still use edit mesh to work

KDR_11k

That's a bug that needs to be fixed.

Amouro

hmm, well thank you but it doesn't really answer my question. i guess what im looking for is a definition of a mesh and of a poly. from what i see in max they act no differently.
just as an example, if i was modeling a video game character, should i make it an editable poly or mesh?

Rick Stirling

Mesh works with triangles. A triangle is a 3 sided polygon. Poly works with polygons, with any number of sides. Internally, each polygon is still made from triangles, but the trianglesness is hidden from the user. Instead of seeng a square as 2 triangles, they see it as a square.

Amouro

okay thant makes more sense.
i guess i got confused by it because if i made a primative cube into a mesh it was still showing me the polys and not the triangles. i didn't notice that if i use the face selection i could pick out the individual triangles.
anyway, don't games still use triangles? i know Half-life 2 does.

Weiser_Cain

As far as I know yah.

Rick Stirling

Yes, but just because the game engine uses triangles doesn't mean that you have to use them.

Don't touch edit mesh.

motives

what happens is the game when you import the model will triangulate it. so you are not bound to build everythin in tri's. However someplace you will do better just triangulating urself so the engine doesnt mess it up (ie there is two ways to triangulate a 4 sided surface)

CrazyButcher

triangulation is already done in max, and you can edit it any time in poly mode as well, in max5 at least there is a button that says "edit triangulation"

just as your viewport renderer needs triangles too

Eric Chadwick

One thing we've found useful (well, the only thing really) with Edit Mesh is that the inner edges of a polygon stay fixed, which is good when we need to export morph targets to the game.

Edit Poly tends to re-arrange those inner edges to the shortest lengths, as polygons are squished and stretched during modeling. This is cool as far as modeling goes, but the downside is it causes some morph targets to get different triangle windings than others. This then causes rendering problems in-game. We have a tool that fixes this, but it's still a pain.

Anyhow, we could stick with all-Poly morph model pipeline, but we'd have to triangulate everything first, which really defeats the whole Poly modeling toolset. Or we can just single out the differences and hand-fix them.

So for us there's still a reason to keep Edit Mesh around.

I wonder if anyone else gets this issue with in-game morphs? We only notice it with extreme changes, almost never with subtle ones.

Ryno

Editable Poly is a far more advanced toolset. Edit Mesh has not been changed in the last 5 years, while Edit Poly's tools have been refined, and added to. Edit Poly allows you to do things in minutes which would take hours of work in EMesh. It does try to manage internal triangulation for you, which can be helpful at times, but you can manually manage inner triangulation by using one click Turn Edges (Max 7), or Edit Triangulation.

You would be foolish to use Edit Mesh, unless you had a VERY specific reason for doing so.

Amouro

where does editable patch fit in to all this?

Eric Chadwick

Read the help file? OK... don't jump on me.

Patches are polygonal surfaces that you control by moving around their edge-splines. They have their benefits and drawbacks. Most people don't use them on game assets, although Scott likes them (or did... Scott?).

Rick Stirling

I used them for a while on Fightbox - they wre fun to play with, and aren't as awkward as people say. The good thing is that you can build a really smooth high res model - no details mind you - and then dial down the level of resolution.

I prefer box modelling thoguh.

Delaney King

The most important things to know about EMESH / EPOLY is...

1: in emesh more than two edges can share an edge.
2: in epoly they cant.

This helps keep things clean, but does mean if you want to do stuff like extruded edge hair on game characters you will need to weld the final models.

The big mind shift you have to make is this. In emesh, hidden edges still exist but are hidden. You have to turn these manually to get them the way you want. In epoly, a hidden edge isnt really hidden... its auto generated. What this means is that you never worry about hidden edges whilst modelling. When you need control over an edge, its best to make that edge a REAL edge... use connect or cut to do this. This gives you complete control.