Is this good modelling practice?

AlexLegg

Just finished following modelling tut, and had some queries about how they did some things. Wondered if I could get your guys opinions on it.

See the attached images.

In the first one, an edge goes into another, half way. Creating a square poly with 5 verts.

And in the second, the top surface of a complex shape is not split up, its just a shape with many verts.


Is this good practice?

Will the game engine triangulate this and all is OK?

Thanks

Alex

MikeF

both of these examples will result in very poor triangulation if they are left up to the engine. You might be able to get by using diffuse maps only, but even then, the normal shading would most likely come out completely broken.

Always stick to quads whenever you can, modelling like this results in way too many ngons which will be a complete waste in performance if you're working with an older engine or mobile device

Jet_Pilot

the first example is no big deal.. the engine will triangulate that for you. The second mesh has the chance of flipping out. i would, by hand, go in and connect the verts and quad it or triangulate it up. other wise the engine might do it completely wrong and have edges that stick out from your mesh.

AlexLegg

Thanks guys. Thought as much.

These vids were professional as well! LOL

r_fletch_r

I've never heard of the NGons slowing down rendering. So far as I know most exporters triangulate Quads and NGons before they get to the engine. If not just do it before exporting, no need to swear off Ngons

Also there is need to stick to quads on your low poly. Quads and Tris mix fine here. Quads have some advantages but so long as your smoothing is good you dont need to worry about using triangles.

mortalhuman

Keep ngons off of your low poly unless they are huge flat areas that won't shade wrong and won't produce a million thin triangles. Stick to triangles and quads, it's all triangles when it exports, but using quads and triangles you can control it whereas with ngons the triangles will be produced automatically, and you will get bad triangles.

Model high poly any way you want as long as it smooths correctly. IE - inset ngons with support edges that are correct.

MikeF

r_fletch_r wrote: »

I've never heard of the NGons slowing down rendering. So far as I know most exporters triangulate Quads and NGons before they get to the engine. If not just do it before exporting, no need to swear off Ngons

Also there is need to stick to quads on your low poly. Quads and Tris mix fine here. Quads have some advantages but so long as your smoothing is good you dont need to worry about using triangles.

what i meant was that by having a poorly optimized mesh with lots of ngons you're more likely to have excessive triangles upon triangulation, thus slowing down performance

Snader

I think what's more problematic is that the engine might change the order of vertices, and decide they're supposed to be copnnected like this:

Which would lead to a huge clusterfuck of broken shapes, inverted normals, zfighting and general ugliness.

The first example is less critical, but could still have some artifacts. I'd say triangulate everything before importing, with not even quads remaining (unless the engine supports that, like the DS).

If it's going to end up as triangle, might as well make sure it's the triangles you want.

AlexLegg

Thanks guys, all very useful info. I was thinking along these lines but wasn'y confident.

Farfarer

You can already see that your 3D package is struggling to triangulate it correctly (bottom of the top curve - there's a big shear skewed off to the left) - let alone automated triangulation for a game engine.

It's good practice to just do this manually as you go. While ngons tends to work out OK on export, if you get into the habit of just triangulating ngons as you go along - you can guarantee that there will never be triangulation errors on export.