I have a scene in 3dsmax thats around 26,000 polys(not tris) and 30,000 verts. But when i export it as an fbx and import it into unity it goes up to 600,000 verts and 250,000 tris what the heck!!! its unusable.
Any thoughts on why this is happening?
I’d definitely expect the vert and tri counts to be different between Max and Unity, but you’re right that does seem like a rather large difference.
As for why the difference is so big,theres a few things that might be worth checking.
1)Double check the scene to make sure that there isn’t any hidden objects within the scene, or that your mesh hasn’t been accidentally duplicated. If there is, it might be worth deleting the objects or doing an export selected.
2)Check your smoothing groups. Boundarys between smoothing groups causes verts to be duplicated so that each vertex can have its own normal.
3)Check your UVs / textures, again wherever there is a UV seam, verts need to be duplicated so they each get a unique UV coord.
4)[I’ve read that] the number of pixel lights in your scene can also make a difference to this number, this is because a mesh has to be rendered multiple times from each light in the scene. Try using vertex lights and/or baked lighting instead and see if that makes a difference.
Hope something here helps.
as a side note, I’ve found its worth setting in the 3dsmax preferences display as tris rather than polys. seeing as polys can contain any number of tris which makes it less meaningful when you are modelling.
Hi SBurgess,
Thanks so much for answering this. You cleared a lot up.
Number 4 in particular. Had no idea that pixel lights increased the vert count. Turning it to pixel lighting doubles the scenes vertex and tri count :shock: . Vertex lighting doesn’t really cut it though so I’m just gonna wait for beast to light map the whole scene for me when unity 3 is released.
Trimode sounds good. How do i set 3dsmax to tri mode? Customize → Preferences - > ?
I tend to add a “turn to poly” modifier to the top of my stack and limit the max polys to 3.
Thats also helpful as when exported any quads are automatically converted to tris, which might not nessicarily have the right triangulation you are looking for.
Unity 3.0’s deferred rendering should also help remove that poly count jump with number of lights.
Also double check that you didn’t select double sided, as that doubles your triangle count.
Joe thats a nice tip thanks.
Ntero select double sided where?
A 224 vertex and 352 tri model in max shows up as 352 tris and 1300 vertsin unity in a completely empty unity scene.
Nearly 4 times the verts.
I did a test where i just created a cube with the turn to poly modifier on. It has 8 verts and 12 tris like expected.
The unity scene has 12 tris but 24 faces.
So now i know that faces in unity dont share vertices. Is this just a standard thing?
Yes, hard edges require a doubling of the vertex count.