tris versus quads in game art
hello mates, i have a question regarding an art test im making.
Im asked to create a lowpoly character using a maximum of 700 triangles. By triangles do you think they mean that my mesh should be tris only (3 sided polys) or am i free to use quads as well ?
Quads works a whole lot more for me.
thank you
Im asked to create a lowpoly character using a maximum of 700 triangles. By triangles do you think they mean that my mesh should be tris only (3 sided polys) or am i free to use quads as well ?
Quads works a whole lot more for me.
thank you
Replies
Yea man, quads are good. In game art production if your given a polycount in tri's then you use quads for the most part because they are easier to work with and its easier to keep track of edgeloops etc. If you want to turn everything into tri's you can just hit triangulate. Polycounts are almost always given in tri's, but this doesn't mean you have to use all tri's. Unless they say otherwise, go with quads where you can.
I dream of a day when model triangle counts aren't used in production restrictions...
I present you, the Holy Tri-force
There's nothing hairsplitting about it. Polygons are irrelevant to rendering and no longer do a sufficient job in describing rendering costs. If people are going to make a limit for rendering expense, make it for vertices, not polygons, as the same number of polygons can have wildly different rendering costs.
Tricounts are a very qualitative way of measuring cost, yet we treat it like an exact number. If we are going to use poly counts as a guage, then we shouldn't be so strict with them. We don't go into a store and see the prices as "# handfuls of pennies".
This isn't as relevant for low-poly work as the OP has, but when we're talking about many thousands of polygons, it is.
Sorry to the OP for the OT.
Tricounts are a very qualitative way of measuring cost, yet we treat it like an exact number. If we are going to use poly counts as a guage, then we shouldn't be so strict with them. We don't go into a store and see the prices as "# handfuls of pennies".
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Well if you want to be very specific about it it's not just the number of verts either. You've got to include the UV splits, the shader instructions, tri-stripping, and the T+L of the triangle to guage the true cost of drawing it.
But usually we just approximate all this info by giving a triangle limit and assume that the artist will take into account these other factors. Trying to explain why you can't auto-unwrap things to create many UV splits can be frustrating sometimes and it's easier to just approximate.
There probably isn't a single artist on this forum who builds in tris only, unless working on something that is realy lowpoly. You can just turn your quads into tris in a mouse click in most 3d packages.
Im asked to create a lowpoly character using a maximum of 700 triangles. By triangles do you think they mean that my mesh should be tris only (3 sided polys) or am i free to use quads as well ?
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A whole lot discussing going on over this, for sure. I'll throw in my perspective on it from layman's view, and see if I can clear things up a bit (or just make things more confusing).
When they say triangles, they mean triangles. Don't let talk about vertices confuse you.
It doesn't mean your character should be modeled in triangles, use quads when you can as it looks better. When importing a model into a game engine it is going to be converted to triangles.
This is an automatic process of splitting quads into triangles, and because it is automatic you are going to go in by hand and tri som of these quads first. Why?
Because a quad consists of two triangles, there's an invisible edge in there so that the quad can deform, and it can go in two "directions". Sometimes when that edge is in the wrong direction, you can get strange popping effects when the mesh deforms as it is being animated, and sometimes you need to fix it manually just because it plainly gives you a better shape.