Poly Count

[km1961]

Hi

When creating items in GMAX what is the best way of lowering the poly count

Thank you

Kevin

 

[johnwhelan]

Watch out for cylinders and curves.

Run through Paul Hobbs tutorials he has many of the techniques for keeping the poly count down in them.

If you're just starting Blender is probably the way to go.

Cheerio John

 

[VinnyBarb]

Make it simple :hehe:.

Having said that, one can just use one plane where only one side of whatever is getting build. Posts for roadsigns etc. can be 3 sided only, braces on, say, water tank supports can be 2 sides, 90 degrees apart (elongated box with 2 of the long sides removed) and textured as 2 sided faces etc.

Use the "Smooth" modifier on your simpler mesh(es).

Polygons on whatever one is constructing can be eliminated if one can not see them, like the underside of rolling stock or the like and so on.

Or use LOD (Level Of Detail) for your mesh(es), if the item is close, the mesh can be more elaborate done, when moving the view away from the item, some of the more detailed polygons can be deleted in the next lower LOD mesh, as long this does not spoil the look of whatever this is one is constructing and so on, the further the item is located from view.

As you can see, one has several options to do this.

Cheers

VinnyBarb

 

[paulzmay]

Also, don't boolean unless you have to. Use F4 in GMax to see the actual poly triangles on your model - you'll soon get to see where the polys go. And double-sided textures effectively double the polys of the item rendered in this way, so avoid that method if you can.

At the same time, try to keep your textures down to a single file per asset if you can, even if the file gets a little larger. That has more impact on performance on simpler objects than poly count alone.

Paul

 

[Dinorius_Redundicus]

You sometimes need to make meshes with a relatively high density of polygons on surfaces that you want to curve, but it creates a wasteful amount of polys on the other visible surfaces that don't require such detail. If all you need is a flat surface on one of the sides, you can delete and replace its polygons with just 1 rectangle (2 polys) by joining only the outer corner vertices. Be sure to delete any 'internal' vertices left isolated by this process, as I suspect they will add to the rendering load even if they don't count as polygons.

Just to add to something Paulzmay said; F4 will reveal the mesh framework but it won't show every triangle since many edges are created as invisible. To see them all, you need be at the 'Edge' level of the mesh stack, select all edges, then scroll down the control panel and hit the 'Visible' button.