What is the thing with triangulation?

LordScottish

Hey there
I am sorry if this post is not really necessary, but I have a question concerning meshes that really confuses me. I have been modeling for some years now and there were some chances in the modeling workflow during this time due to better hardware and higher polycounts.
At the beginning I used to work with triangles only, to reduce the polys. I set them where they defined the shape or where they helped with the smoothing.
Then many people switched to modeling with quads and I have heard about things like polyflow. Until now, I thought that the polyflow is mainly important for the smoothing, the meshsmoothing (works better on quads, important for normalmaps) and for deformation.
Until one of my contract work partners told me for a weaponmodel, that they don't need it triangulated, when I showed him a WIP. I am curious, what exactly does that mean? Can anyone help me? How important is the so called meshflow for a weaponmodel, beside the obvious smoothing? I am kind of confused, because I always work with triangles if I do weaponmodels
Well, any answer would be welcome It's never too late to learn new stuff

Sage

Are you using Max? If you are you'll notice that in Max when you select faces it selects either a tri or a quad. When you model with just quads it's a little easier to select faces (polygon), as in less clicks. Quads are two tri with their middle edge invisible.. I'm not sure if that is what you mean, but it's easier to deal with than having to select all the tri in a face than just clicking it once. In Max it would be a workflow thing, especially with the poly object since it won't let you turn visible edges without hiding them first. The only way I found to turn visible edges in the poly object is to select the edge and hit backspace to make it invisible, and to make it visible again you just select the two vertex you want to join and hit connect. I hope this helps. Later.

Alex

MoP

Well, everything will end up triangulated in a game engine anyway, I always triangulate realtime in-game models as I work anyway for the reasons you say (definining shape/smoothing with optimal number of polys).

The only reason you might not want to triangulate a low-poly model completely is if you're giving the model for someone else to work with. It takes a lot longer to get an easily-workable, mostly-quad mesh from a triangulated model, than it does to properly triangulate a mostly-quad mesh.

So if someone else in the team likes to work in quads (like Sage says, workflow reasons, easier to select polys and add detail with connects and bevels etc.), you should leave your mesh in quads so they don't get frustrated trying to work with a totally-triangulated mesh.

You can display all edges anyway (in Max at least) when working with Editable Poly objects and quads, if you go to the Viewport Display settings in Customize -> Preferences menu. It'll show "hidden" edges (the triangle between two verts of a quad) as a dotted line, and visible edges as a solid line. You can easily turn hidden edges in Max7 with the Turn button in the Edit Edges rollout of EPoly, or in earlier versions of Max with Edit Triangulation.

If you've done all the work, like UV's and texturing too, though, I don't think it really matters if the final model is triangulated or not, unless your client SPECIFICALLY asks for a model in quads. It'll be turned into triangles in the end anyway. Anything else is personal preference.

LordScottish

Thanks for the very useful answers! I'm glad to hear that it's just for workflow reasons.