Deleting unseen faces???

Notes

In school we were always taught to delete the unseen faces to save tris...makes sense...then one of my instructors had us re-create a static mesh from UDK to seen how the pros worked...great assignment, I learned alot.
But after I got the UDK mesh into max and started taking it apart to see how they modeled it...I saw that the unseen faces were not deleted.
Is this a common practice to NOT delete unseen faces while working in UDK while making games or was it just a preference from the guy/s who made the UDK meshes?

WarrenM

Sometimes the reality of shipping a game gets in the way of ideal optimization but ... can you post a shot of which mesh and which polys seem unnecessary?

Zipfinator

Could have been a modular mesh also. The "unseen" triangles might be seen based on how the model is used in certain spots.

King Mango

I've noticed a lot of the simpler meshes forgo decimation as well. I wonder if this is for shadow reasons. Solid objects seem to cast shadow better even if you check cast shadow as two sided in the mesh material.

passerby

i tend to keep my back faces for lighting reasons, and to keep more versatility in placement.

though i do make the parts i dont expect to been seen as simple as possible

Notes

WarrenMarshall wrote: »

Sometimes the reality of shipping a game gets in the way of ideal optimization but ... can you post a shot of which mesh and which polys seem unnecessary?

This crate here...ignore the extra tri-s...it came in triangulated....but this was the faces I deleted....


Ignore the presentation style...it was a class assignment :P

Notes

passerby wrote: »

i tend to keep my back faces for lighting reasons, and to keep more versatility in placement.

though i do make the parts i dont expect to been seen as simple as possible

So the faces in most udk meshes were kept for lighting purposes???

passerby

in the exemple you shown i dont see any reason but speed and lazyness, but what i was talking about was things like modular building sets.

also if you look around with the ut3/udk stuff a lot of props are made from parts of other props, which could be the reason for the extra faces, so they can be easily torn off in max and put on something else.