Nonagons bad?

n88tr

I'm getting into texturing after just installing my legit copy of Photoshop CS4. lol on a side note I realize I know nothing about it...

Anyways say I have a cyclinder. And then I view from the top and delete the edges on the top and botton... thus I have a nonagon, correct? Anyways I've been told that this is BAD for when I go to texture but I see other people do the same things and have told me it doesn't matter for the texturing process... like this model here with a ton of nonagons

PixelMasher

if its planar like that it should be fine, numerous games ive worked on have had assets with tons of n-gons on them and its been fine. if it gets messed up in engine then go back and triangulate it otherwise it should be ok.

Ben Apuna

I don't think n-gons will hurt you during the UV layout and/or texturing process.

However there is a possibility that you could end up with some bad triangulation when you export to a game engine.

Also when baking normal maps you want to have your model triangulated the exact same way your in game model will be.

r_fletch_r

N-Gon is an abbreviation of N sided polygon. meaning a polygon with an arbitrary(N) number of sides.
If you say Nonagons at parties girls will laugh at you

So far as the N-Gons go, finish the model and triangulate it. This will avoid any nasty issues on those side ngons where the triangulation could go wrong (the ngons profiles are concave so its possable to connect 2 verts in the face which will cut across open space)

PredatorGSR

It is a bad idea to have ngons on a game rez asset. Lots of exporters and engines won't accept meshes that have more than 4 sides, and in production you never want to send a mesh up the pipeline will potentially be sent back to you to fix, especially for something as dumb as having ngons.

xNormal for example won't accept ngons, Zbrush doesn't either but will fix them for you (not necessarily how you intended though), and in my last job our exporter would fail if you had ngons. So it is never a good idea to have them, especially when they are so easy to fix.

However, it is ok to have them on high rez meshes that you use to bake normal maps from, since they won't actually be used in an engine, and almost always you will be subdividing them which will make it all quads anyway.

Having planar ngons won't really affect the texturing process, however you should cut in all the edges before you start texting so that you can use those edges to create uv seams if you need to. In your example, none of those are likely to affect the texture except for the bottom of the grip, that could cause shading issues. Also if you want to use xnormal or other programs to bake ao or a mask, you'll need it to be free of ngons.

konstruct

its all tris at the end of the day. no matter what game engine you put it in, your dealing with tris. an ngon is really just tris you haven't defined yet. the same goes for quads.
the reason why you hear everyone pissing and moaning about keeping quads is because it makes the mesh easy to work with. selecting loops and rings becomes easy-peasy.

where texuring comes into play is the unwrap process. If I have an ngon that I don't want to deal with in terms of extra tris n` crap,- (that I`d probably end up stitching together anyways during the unwrap,) I just leave it as an ngon.

Also- you can define your tris, and then delete those edges for ease of use. 3dsmax will remember your tiangulation.

r_fletch_r

konstruct wrote: »

the reason why you hear everyone pissing and moaning about keeping quads is because it makes the mesh easy to work with. selecting loops and rings becomes easy-peasy.

Careful there, thats pretty misleading. The reason people recommend quads
is not just because of the work flow advantages. The main reason is the predictable way they subdivide when mesh smoothed and the consistent way they light with gouraud shading. If you are subdivision modeling there are no ifs or buts about it. if you want a consistent curved surface you use Quads.

In the context of SDS 1 quad smooths totally differently to 2 adjacent triangles using the same vertexs. It may be all tris once you export, but until that point there are clear advantages to working with a quad mesh