Thread: Low Poly
View Single Post
# 5 08-04-2003 , 05:25 AM
dannyngan's Avatar
Registered User
Join Date: Dec 2002
Location: Seattle, WA
Posts: 1,154
From a technical standpoint, all game engines end up reading faces as triangles. Doesn't matter if they are quads or not. You can use quads and n-sided faces, but the engine will break it down to triangles. The reason you see a lot of game models as tri's is because that is the only way the modeler can define how where the edges are and how they deform.

Take a quad for instance. A quad is actually 2 triangles. If the quad is deforming (on a character, for example), which way does the face bend? If left to the engine, you may not get desirable results. Now imagine that on a row of quads. You could get some really odd deformations. This is where converting the faces to tri's really helps. You can be very explicit about how a mesh deforms.

As far as modeling goes, you can treat the model like any other poly model. Just use whatever poly tools you want. You can always triangulate the mesh, merge vertices, collapse faces, etc at the end to create a tri-only mesh. It's all about control.


Danny Ngan
Animator | Amaze Entertainment
my website | my blog | my job