Beer glass scene creation
This course contains a little bit of everything with modeling, UVing, texturing and dynamics in Maya, as well as compositing multilayered EXR's in Photoshop.
# 16 03-01-2007 , 05:59 PM
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everything is triangualated because thats what hardware can redraw on screen.
software renders [MR, Vray] have to triangulate [or re-tessellate] everything at render time. everything [quads n-gons] gets tessellated into tris at render time

# 17 03-01-2007 , 07:13 PM
Acid44
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wow didnt think id get so much attention so fast but its all good still

@everyone thanx for the help guys now to find a maya to gta converter......user added image

# 18 05-01-2007 , 08:15 PM
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tris are the only thing that can be rendered (apart from surfaces such as spheres, planes, cones, and others defined by a fixed equation (quadric surfs, quartic surfs, NURBS... all that bullshit))

anyawy, when you model, you usually want to keep it all quads (unless you really know how to take advantage of the tris and n-gon's smoothness destroying ability) if you're smoothing. If the model is going into a game, use whatever you want user added image

hope dat helped


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# 19 04-08-2011 , 11:08 AM
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All aboard the crazy train that tries to say "The only valid n-gon has more the three sides and less then five". I SAY: POPPYCOCK! SHINNANAGINS! WHERE IS MY BROOM!

I have commented on this topic numerous times!

I am not saying go out of you way to make ngons and triangles. Triangles are hard to avoid at times and as far as ngons they can always be turned into quads and triangles. The key is to understand how your model is to be smoothed and whether it will be deformed. Triangles are very useful in reducing mesh density and edge congestion in narrowing areas of a model and therefore can be beneficial.

In the end no matter what you build gets triangulated. From my experience maya appears to be the only program that goes ape shit when texturing non-quad models. If you look at the models built in lightwave for TV series like BSG and Stargate they boolean the piss out of their models to cut panels and windows and such using stencil and solid drill operations creating n-gons up the kazoo and go straight to production with them!

Try to bring one of those models into Maya and it would cough up a lung! I read an article where they imported the starship model (from the new stargate) from lightwave into maya and it took a week of rebuilding the model to get maya to digest it! To me that is a MAYA weakness! In an industry that is always under pressure to produce in short time frames, why add such a time and life leeching constraint as to force all model to be 100% quad? Maybe that is why those series and studios use Lightwave and not Maya. In any event the Lightwave and Modo rendering systems are lightyears ahead of maya's which has not been updated for to many YEARS!

So part of the issue with maya is its renderer is not ngon and tri frendly (in fact back in the day, around Maya 4, mental ray would not render a model at all if it had a single ngon or tri in it! You would get a blank screen). So the ngon / tri phobia has a historical context in Maya as well.

Look at Modo, Lightwave, Max just to name a few alternate modeling apps and they are far less freaked out by tri's and ngons.


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 04-08-2011 at 11:43 AM.
# 20 04-08-2011 , 12:36 PM
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ehh, what? i'm a bit confused.
maya can render non quad models just fine. Are you talking about CAD/Lidar data? this is often used in post production, it may just look like it was created from a bunch of booleans. Lidar scans will be lots of triangles.
Maya is customizable which is why companies want to use maya. The maya i'm using now is better than your maya because there is a dedicated team writing plugins for us. There is a thing called a pipeline that everyone has to work within. It is basically how a shot gets made, who does what and how it is passed around so everyone can do their job. I think you are too focused on the modeling aspect of the industry. modeling is the very first thing that is done. They are some of the first people to go home at the end of a day while others stay on to finish the shot.
https://www.cgsociety.org/index.php/C...ureSpecial/mpc

btw this thread is 4 years old.

# 21 04-08-2011 , 01:33 PM
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Cool, first time a thread of mine has been necro'd! Jesus, I look a tool in this one >_<

Since this thread was posted, it seems it isn't just a Maya thing anymore, the game engine I'm currently modeling for will shit brix over tri's, renders them 3x longer than quads.

# 22 04-08-2011 , 05:08 PM
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no honestdom I am talking about maya back at rev 4 having serious problems with ngons it seems to persist to some degree as people and maya still freak the hell out if they see one triangle or omg forbid an ngon in a model. I am no going to debate this point anymore.


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675

Last edited by ctbram; 04-08-2011 at 05:18 PM.
# 23 04-08-2011 , 05:16 PM
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ohhh, i thought you were one of those people!
yeah no one cares about triangles or ngons, not unless they are modellers and then not really either.

# 24 04-08-2011 , 05:34 PM
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I am no going to debate this point anymore.

You seem to show great displeasure at having to debate this further but then why go back and post in a 4 year old thread?

@acid, you're not that bad, at least better than I was then....

# 25 04-08-2011 , 09:48 PM
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I did not notice the date it was at the top of the list of current threads at the time I responded!


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675
# 26 05-08-2011 , 12:27 AM
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I did not notice the date it was at the top of the list of current threads at the time I responded!

Weird, I wonder if someone posted but then it was deleted?
If not, it might be wise to file a bug report or something.

# 27 05-08-2011 , 12:39 AM
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It's okay I just get riled up when people go on and on about the occasional triangle or ngon like they will cause the world to fly off its axis and hurl into the Sun! I have used a number of modeling packages and spend time in many forums and Maya forums are the only ones that I must say literally have what I can only describe as quad nazi's!


"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675
# 28 05-08-2011 , 02:16 AM
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It's okay I just get riled up when people go on and on about the occasional triangle or ngon like they will cause the world to fly off its axis and hurl into the Sun! I have used a number of modeling packages and spend time in many forums and Maya forums are the only ones that I must say literally have what I can only describe as quad nazi's!

thats actually a really interesting point you bring up rick, about the 'tri-phobia' going back to maya 4 and further when maya couldnt render them. makes complete sense.

it is strange because i do often get the feeling that im being naughty if see an ngon or tri in a model and dont make haste to ammend it, when, more often than not, it'll never give me the slightest problem again.

not starting a debate though. each to their own. but yeah, i have never heard or read that about the early versions of maya

acid: what game engine are you modeling for? and why? what's the project?

# 29 05-08-2011 , 04:04 AM
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Can't say on either point, I'm under an NDA user added image

# 30 05-08-2011 , 08:39 AM
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Can't say on either point, I'm under an NDA user added image

That always sounds really cool, like your working on a top secret project for the military or something; it's usually disappointing.

I once wrote a .obj importer for openGL that would only work if the mesh you started from was entirely quads. But then it worked on the assumption that all faces were triangles....

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