N-Sided Faces on weapons for video games

[Arcanox]

Ngon faces are not ok in the sense that they are hard to work with for the artists. Often keeping areas as clearly defined as possible is a good thing because problems aren't easy to spot when the triangulation of the mesh is hidden. You may miss certain things with Ngons is basically what I'm getting at.

The other reason why they are not good is because of tri-stripping. Essentially all meshes for games are exported as triangles. As I understand it, triangles that are put into a series of strips are far more efficient for game engines and it allows them to load and unload geometry data with these strips. Ngons can be a serious problem in terms of optimization because the triangle stripping can be disturbed or hard to manage at the least.

There are exceptions, and thats the fact that certain game engines are getting much better at handling unstripped series of triangles. To some extent, the triangles can be managed on that model, but if efficency were a very important factor, you would most likely see those large Ngons divided up to make that area more managable.

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