Low / high poly and triangles

Replies

• 
  Options

  Offline / Send Message

  musashidan high dynamic range

  Jul 2016

  1 - for games/realtime the lowpoly is the final asset that will be imported to the engine. The highpoly is a mesh that is used to bake maps from, to capture the high fidelity detail to a normal map so that an aproximation of that detail will make the lowpoly look like it's highpoly counterpart without the overheads of that highpoly in the realtime environment. What you are confusing is an LOD (level of detail)mesh. This is an optimised version of the lowpoly that can have several levels that become automatically more optimised the further they are from the player or camera in the engine. These meshes can be hand built and imported as part of a named group to the engine, or automatically generated using different methods.
  
  2 - yes, the engine will triangulate all geometry but this can also be done manually before map baking to ensure that triangulation doesn't change for the purpose of the normal map bake. If not modeling for games then the topology can be anything you like that suits your purposes. Quads just make life in your pipeline much easier to deal with - sculpting/uv unwrap/rigging.
  N-gons (>4 sided faces) are frowned upon generally but are often used depending on the purpose of the mesh purpose/preference of the artist (or client/employer)

  0 · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
• 
  Options

  Offline / Send Message

  ElleKitty polycounter lvl 3

  Jul 2016

  You want to make a high poly, and then go wild with its details, and shaders, and textures, and so on. You dont even have to UV the high poly model if it wont have a texture (say, simple shiny metal material). And it can be made out of any amount of models. Only one thing really matters, that it looks very good. You probably dont even have to paint it in Max, you can carry it into Substance and paint it there.
  
  Then you make the lowpoly, with an amount of geometry detail to your liking, you'll gradually get a hang of what you can model and what you can skip. You also need to UV this model, no UV coordinates should overlap.
  
  Then you use your application-specific (likely substance) method to steal high-poly's details into textures (which is the main point of baking), these textures will automatically fit the UVs of the lowpoly that you used in the process. You probably want to output Diffuse, Normalmap, Roughness, Metalness, Ambient Occlusion, and maybe Displacement if you figure out how to use it in your game engine.
  
  High poly wont be used in the game itself. What you're asking about is LOD, which stands for Level Of Detail. It is up to the designer to make different meshes for different LODs. This can be worthwhile, but keep in mind that this means creating several lowpoly models for a single highpoly object, and baking them all from the main highpoly.
  
  If you're just working in Max, and Max can tank it, you're fine with just highpoly objects. But sometimes I still bake a proper lowpoly (sometimes in a different scene) and then use that instead. It simplifies things in a long run. Let's say you want to fill an area with rocks using a particle system. Having 1.000 rocks with 100.000 faces each will needlessly take you extra preload time for every render, but 1.000 rocks with 100 faces will preload without you even noticing it, plus the mesh looks simpler and cleaner at a wireframe glance. Additionally, if you're going to copy a model a lot, making a lowpoly will probably leave you with a simple polymesh, instead of that monstrosity of parametric modifier stack in your highpoly. So you dont NEED to make low-polies, but if you feel that it'll take some strain off of you and your computer, it might just be worth it.
  
  As for triangles, dont worry too much about them. They're not that bad. You just want your mesh to be clean. Quads create surfaces that resemble square-grids which look clean to the human mind, but well-placed triangles could very well be a cleaner solution than a quad. You should be able to tell a clean and orderly mesh at a glance, it comes with experience.
  
  As for Ngons, that can be a bit of a trouble. Go to Edit Poly, choose Polygon subobject mode, then scroll down a bit and you'll see buttons called "Turn" and "Retriangulate". Click "Turn". The secret is that everything is triangles internally, even before you export it from Max! Max just keeps them out of sight. You can click the dotted lines to flip their orientation, or you can hit "Retriangulate" to let Max decide the order. Quads only have two trangulation states... but Ngons have many possibilities, most of which will look wrong. So to put some extra control on Ngons you can "Turn" the dotted lines by hand, but you may just as well replace them with actual and visible edges.
  
  As for Turbosmooth, it's quite fine. It outputs the same kind of mesh as without it. But Turbosmooth still doesnt turn Ngons into quads, so you're left at the mercy of the invisible dotted lines, because when you export, each of those invisible lines will become a visible triangle edge.
  
  If you want to triangulate or quad right there in Max, put a "Turn to Poly" modifier above your modelling modifiers and limit the polygon size to 3 or 4, dont worry, it's non-destructive. It has a set of controls that makes the division more predictable, so you can get your mesh how you like it before you get to export it.
  

  0 · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
• 
  Options

  Offline / Send Message

  lecra polycounter lvl 3

  Jul 2016

  musashidan & ElleKitty Guy's, many thanks for your excellent explanations, Much appreciated! Now I see a small light at the horizon :-)

  0 · Share on FacebookShare on Twitter