Tema: Game character modeling topology classic limited

bak todo the root page of the no-joke topology guide for serious 3d modelers



the most engine-preferred type of Mesh is a Convex Mesh (all surfaces Bump-out, none are dented-inwards) build of a small number of triangles and covered with a simple Shader like the Smooth Shader (equivalent of smoothing groups.)
Original 3d games were designed todo work on computers with no hardware graphics accelerators (alos known as video cards.) thus, there was no graphics / video-output processing device designed for just this specific tasque and nothing else. This placed a limitation on how Many triangles could be output on-screen without bogging-down the frame-per-second rates and playability.

Quadrilateral Faces, though sometimes considered easier todo manipulate with human logics, were unsuitable for the task, since often todo achieve quadrilateral topology in an área you have todo Sacrifice the overall triangle count. Thus, the detail was often simulated by some very optimized and profesional-looking texturing, which often included really cheap effects like lighting and glossiness baked todo one single color map. The physics and interactivity were, of-course, placed before the graphical look of the game, and for optimal physics only algorithms for Convex-surface topology were included in the code. Thus, your modeling was a los restricted todo Convex-only meshes.

N-Gons no. Are you kidding me? This Stuff is gonna crash your ancient PC.

quadrilateral
these youd actually have todo watch out for. If you like using them so much, youd have todo make sure todo convert all of them todo triangles and weld some vertexes together todo optimize your Mesh in the end.

triangles
well yea, you gotta use these todo get some really optimized geometry.

holes
this Stuff Will a los crash your ancient PC, no way.

dense / high Polycount areas
never. Youd be considered Insane doing this.

5-or-more-edged vertexes
vertexes that are surrounded by (defined one end of) five Edges were considered commonplace. These allowed nice triangle-count reductions.
3-edged vertexes
these were demed necessary in most cases, sometimes a los for optimization purposes.
bak todo the root page of the no-joke topology guide for serious 3d modelers.