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The Commander
08-26-2004, 02:23 AM
I'm joining in working on a mod for an upcoming game, and have started modelling characters for it. I have never worked on game models before, and often here people refer to poly's as 'triangles'. Is it necessary for game models to be made up of triangles instead of squares? This seems very inefficient with regard to the number of poly's on a model. Is there some particular reason that (should it be so), that triangles must be used?

I'd rather not have to re-model large portions of my characters, but I'd rather find out now than later...
Ifx3d
08-26-2004, 03:30 AM
my thoughts on the are not to make the model of triangles, one because its stupid to do this to control your tri stipping, because you can do this very easily with edit triangulation....

second whenver you use smoothing groups and meshsmooth with 4 SIDED POLYGONS, you will notice the smoothing never screws up. This is because max is designed to best work with 4 sided polygons...then you can edit your triangulation at the end...or you can convert the model to triangles at the end

the only time i see when converting the model to triangles is ness. is when you have a character that is extremely low polygon...like under 800 or 700 poly's
Stormy
08-26-2004, 12:08 PM
When they say triangles they are looking at the tirangle count of the model. Most games seem to work with triangles over polllys. For example HL2 characters can have a triangle count of 7000.
Shade01
08-29-2004, 03:27 AM
Do not use triangles, stick to quads. Any engine worth a damn these days should be able to intelligently tesselate your mesh for you at run time as long as your model is efficiently built. Staying with quads makes it much easier to maintain form, and makes it easy to work with for other people. Of course, you'll most likely have a total triangle count your working with, but of course you know one polygon is two triangles ;)
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