im confused on polycount

[rotaryman]

Yes you are correct, when a model goes into a game the polys must be tri'd. However, even if you have a mesh that has a multitude of tri's quad's and n-sided polys, in the end when final render occurs the render engine will tesselate everything into tri's. Come to think of it there really is no true quad or n-sided polygon, they are a collection of tri's with the ajacent edges hidden.

I think the reason packages quads is that it is easier to maintain a tangencial continuity to give us those smooth surfaces we are after. If you think of it, if we were forced only to use only tri's then attempting to make a smooth surface would result all cg artist goin bald from pulling their hair out.

Good times

[Tad]

yep, all poly counts are counting tri's,
not quads or wutever.

but quads are important when you start doing things
like mesh smooth, or poly smooth, because the resulting
surface is based on the visible edges, and a tri'd model almost always results in a shitty mesh.

[Wiro]

Actually you have to make sure your software really does count triangles. There was a discussion going on about this in one of the other forums;

Some programs that use winged edges (Max's Editable Polys or Maya's polygons, Mirai, Nendo and probably alot of other software) may not count tris but only n-sided polys.

So in Max or Maya if you have a box the polycount will read 6. If you collapse the box to Editable Mesh in Max or use the Gametool plugin for Maya it will properly read 12 polys.
Or if you create an 8 sided cylinder it may read 10 (8 on sides, 1 on bottom and top) but in reality the count is 32 (16 on sides, 8 on bottom and top if they come together to a vertice at the poles)

This is the number you are really after.

Wiro

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