My friend is learning 3D modelling, and when it came to cloth, he came up with some solution, which automaticaly unwraps planes around 3D model, though creating very solid cloth prototype for further use. It has reasonable amount of vertecies and e.t.c, but mesh topology itself is made of triangles, not of that usual good-looking polygon game character mesh.
Is there some significant importance in keeping game mesh clean and made of square polygons as I usualy see everywhere, or without impact on performance/visual appereance it can be made of triangles?
I personally think, it has no impact on in-game-visuals, how mesh topoly looks like, but it makes simpler to optimize it or paint texture on it or. e.t.c if it has clean topology. Where am I right and where am I wrong?
Unity converts it into triangles upon import anyways, as that’s what the graphics card wants. Keeping it in quads is mainly for the modeling phase because it gives you cleaner topology to work with, quads can be subdivided nicely whereas tris can’t, edge loops are well defined, etc.
Actually game models are forced to be made out of triangles, so I wouldn’t worry about it (models might be made with quads but are converted to tris as an end product. Just click on any model in Unity and you will see it is made of tris) . Having weird topology is usually only a big deal in regards to texturing and rigging (especially rigging, that is why edges loops follow muscle structures in 3d character models).
I see, so real downside of it is that artist will have troubles texturing it and applying rigging. I wonder how much penality it really is for rigging, can’t find any info, but now will test myself and see.
It shouldn’t be a problem for rigging. In fact you’ll often break a quad up into two tris in key areas while skinning to ensure it bends the way you want it to. Doesn’t make much of a difference for texturing really either. Mainly it’s for while you’re still modeling it, tris are a pain to work with. With tris you don’t have defined edge loops and they don’t subdivide nicely…