Videogame modeling: When and when not to connect vertices?

#1

Hi CGSociety, I’m having trouble discerning when I should and should not connect vertices when modeling for video games (or any kind of interactive media). Another way to phrase this question is: can models for games have floating polys that aren’t connected, or does everything need to be connected? It seems to me that leaving the various elements unconnected would help with keeping the polycount down.

For instance, a door handle connected to a door would produce a ton of extra polys as opposed to a door with a handle just floating adjacent to it. How would this affect collision detection? Is there some sort of industry standard for this sort of thing? If anyone could shed some light on this, I’d greatly appreciate it. Attached is a picture showing what i’m talking about (on the left is a model with floating polys making up a ‘ring’ that is adjacent to the cubes face, and on the right everything is connected.)

#2

If I’m right then in game industry more important are triangles than polygons. It’s mean that even if you’ll decrease amount of polygons then it won’t always mean that you’ll decrease triangles amount. Decreasing amount of triangles without changing geometry of model is much harder than in polygons case.

Here is a simple example:

If you can see I’ve deleted some polygons edges but triangle edges are still in the same place what means that I haven’t optimized the model during this process.

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#3

Poly’s are definitely important, but it’s vert counts that are the killer, so as a rule of thumb, if youre making something static like your door example, don’t model the handle in, unless the resolution is required for vertex colour.

Personally with deforming meshes such as characters though i prefer things to be welded in so sections of the mesh dont float when skinned.

#4

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