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Meshsmooth or Turbosmooth

brianmac90
brianmac90
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brianmac90
Hello,

I'm starting to make my models for a game environment I am creating in UDK. I would like to keep the poly-count on each model relatively low. Mesh smooth seems to give me better results with a lower poly-count. Is there any technical reason that I shouldn't use mesh-smooth and use turbo-smooth instead?
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  • Obscura
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    Obscura grand marshal polycounter
    You shouldn't use any of these in a game engine. You should use them only on your highpoly models that you use to bake normalmaps to your lowpoly meshes later.
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  • brianmac90
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    brianmac90
    Oh Ok thanks for replying. So do people use smoothing modifiers (collapsed) at all for game engines? One of the models is a cylindrical hut/house I dont know that I will get the results needed with just my normals and specular.
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  • peanut™
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    peanut™ polycounter lvl 19
    brianmac90 wrote: »
    Oh Ok thanks for replying. So do people use smoothing modifiers (collapsed) at all for game engines? One of the models is a cylindrical hut/house I dont know that I will get the results needed with just my normals and specular.

    In the past Meshsmooth was used a whole lot more, this was before they made a new modifier called turbosmooth. Turbosmooth will give you better result with heavy meshes than meshsmooth. Overall they react the same but turbo is a notch better for extremely large scene.

    However none of the two will be of any help for game engine like UDK. People will tend to want lower Polycounts in game engines for realtime playing. Send them in zbrush instead.
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  • brianmac90
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    brianmac90
    Ok thank you. I guess it will about trial and error until I achieve the correct results for real time playing in UDK. I know poly-count limit can vary depending on a number of variables. Thanks for the quick feedback better response time than most forums. :)
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  • Moosebish
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    Moosebish polycounter lvl 12
    Turbosmooth and Mesh smooth are typically used to create nice high quality models to bake maps from for the low poly version.

    The high poly (turbosmoothed/mesh smoothed) version will never be used in game. Only the final version of the low poly with the different maps as textures.
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  • peanut™
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    peanut™ polycounter lvl 19
    http://www.aversis.be/tutorials/vRay/index.htm

    I agree with the above. If you still want to use meshshooth/turbosmooth use them in Vray, which is a render engine and is made for those two.
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  • brianmac90
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    brianmac90
    How low poly are we talking? Its probably too general a question. Buts lets say I have a low-poly character model which I am going to bring into zbrush and put detail into. Whats my limit for an engine like UDK? Im looking for a general estimate because I know its a vague question.
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  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    The only hard limits for UDK are
    StaticMesh: 65535 ( 16 bit index) vertexes
    SkelMesh : 4,294,967,295 ( 32 bit index) vertexes

    45k tris seems to be normal for "next-gen" characters.
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  • brianmac90
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    brianmac90
    For instance I have a very basic shape for my hut which is 334 polys and I wanted to put the mesh smooth to smooth out the hard edges that brings it to 1,500 polys. Then I wanted to collapse the stack and bring it into z-brush. Is 1,500 poly model too much for low-poly???
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  • brianmac90
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    brianmac90
    ZacD wrote: »
    The only hard limits for UDK are
    StaticMesh: 65535 ( 16 bit index) vertexes
    SkelMesh : 4,294,967,295 ( 32 bit index) vertexes

    45k tris seems to be normal for "next-gen" characters.


    OK cool. It gives me a bit more room then I thought. Thanks :)
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  • ZacD
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    ZacD ngon master
    Normally, you want to have complete control of your low poly mesh, this is what people are actually going to be seeing, and where optimization really matters. So people will model the low poly mesh without smoothing it later. This gives that artist more control, and they can make sure they are wasting any polygons or edge loops.
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  • brianmac90
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    brianmac90
    ZacD wrote: »
    Normally, you want to have complete control of your low poly mesh, this is what people are actually going to be seeing, and where optimization really matters. So people will model the low poly mesh without smoothing it later. This gives that artist more control, and they can make sure they are wasting any polygons or edge loops.


    Good point I will take this into consideration.:)
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  • cptSwing
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    cptSwing polycounter lvl 11
    Meshsmooth, however, allows for subobject-only subdivision. Not sure whether anybody actually makes use of this, though (when I moved to max, turbosmooth was the standard already)..

    cihGunU.jpg
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