Keep your faces planar?

Burtzum

I read somewhere that you want to keep your quads planar for game models or else it won't render right in a game engine. Is this true? It seems impossible. It would rule out vertex positioning by hand, as soon as you push a vertex around a quad is "broken" into two triangles. Also, if its going into a game everything is being broken down into triangles anyway right? Have I misunderstood what it means to keep your faces planar?

pior

nah its just that if you do strongly twisted quads, on export they can very easily be triangulated in the other way that what you had in mind.

If I leave quads in, I personally always go over the most important areas of my models, face by face, and run a make planer script each time. It makes for very elegant meshes.

MoP

There is no need to keep faces planar. Everything becomes triangles in-game anyway.

As Pior said, the only reason you might want to watch out is if you have a quad (or n-sided polygon) that is far from planar, since then you might not be aware of how it will triangulate on export, and things may end up looking bad. This is a fairly rare case in my experience, though, and one which is easily noticed and solved.

rollin

there are a few engines which deal with n-gones and in this case you should triangulate all non coplanar n-gones or make them planar. This is used for lowspec stuff like engines for the web

Burtzum

Alright thanks for the replies guys. Clears things up!