Hi, i’ve heard this word over and over again and thought i’ll get this off my chest by asking people what it was, they helped but they explained it the “Not simple to understand” way.
Can somebody explain what this is to me in a simple way in alot of detail, i know it has to do with models but i’m not actually sure what polygons are.
Thanks for reading
It is a bit hard to explain in text, so here is something I just got off google real quick.
The outlines you see are the edges of polygons. Polygons are square (In this case, but are usually triangular ) flat surfaces. 3D characters in games or movies are constructed by putting a lot of these flat surfaces together to form the shape of the character like kung fu panda in the pic here. The more flat surfaces you put into a model, the more round and organic it looks. But polygons also slow down your game. Usually you will hear people refer to “polycount”, which is the number of flat surfaces(polygons) that make up a given object or scene.
If you look at the characters from n64 era games, they appear more jagged and pointy. This is because they are made up of less polygons, and so have less detail.
Nah, those are meshes.
Think of polygons just as simple geometric shapes like a triangle, a square or a hexagon.
A lot of those polygons, on the most basic level in the 3d world they use triangles, are connected to each other to build a mesh. A mesh defines the geometric hull for an object.
One or more meshes put together can form a more complex 3d model, like a human body, again.
oh right, well you should be thinking about triangles.
computer graphics cards draw triangles only. Thats all they can really draw for math reasons. Some of those triangles have pictures on them called textures.
As you can imagine, drawing enough triangles together can make pretty complex shapes. Thats it.
A polygon is a lot of triangles which are joined up but general purpose graphics cards don’t draw polygons. They draw triangles. People have just got lazy and called them polygons too.
A modelling package will often hide the existence of triangles allowing you to work with quads (square shapes) as the panda picture above.
It’s easier for us to work with squares thats why. The computer term for those squares is called a quad. You need two triangles fitting together to make a quad. Try drawing a picture of those triangles. What would it need to look like?
It’s tough not to sound condescending in these kind of threads, but… just check your math and trigonometry books.
A polygon is a 2d shape composed of three vertexes or more. So guys, some of you kinda have the idea that triangles are not polygons, when in fact, they are.
The key here are vertexes, not edges. A vertex is really a point. 2 points can form a straight line, if they are related graphically. And 3 points turn into vertexes when they are related in a graphical way and form a triangle via three joined, angled lines and your polygons start from there (3 vertexes form a triangle, 4 vertexes form a quadrangle, 5 vertexes form pentagons, etc.)
Greek root:
Polí=many
Goná=angle
Now remember, a vertex is practically the same as a point in 3d programs, and most math books refer to vertexes as the joining point of two lines where you can measure an angle.
Cheers.