Hello there, Today i have hopped back into Blender with the task of making a replica of a video game character.
Now i know for a fact that the characters used in this game are made with Ti angular polys. I don’t know all the ins an outs of game making but i think i’ve heard Tris are good for games.
Anyway, through out all my learning of Blender, i’ve been told many times to avoid faces that don’t have 4 vertices exactly.
I notice that making a triangulated character out of squares is proving to be slightly challenging here and there…
But it got me wondering, what is the benifit to modeling with quads? is it for a better workflow? easy subdivision and loop cuts?
First of all, be careful when you see someone say “never use XXX”. This often leads to misunderstandings
To sum things up :
For the sake of flexibility, for dense game characters (say, over the 5k tris) you will benefit from workingmostly in quads. It makes the model faster to edit, allows for easier skin weighting, and so on. Of course you can use triangles where needed, mostly to avoid any ambiguity as far as diagonals are concerned and of course for pointy things.
While some formats used for asset import into game engines do support quads (OBJ, FBX, and so on), internally a game uses triangles at render time. That’s something to keep in mind because …
if you use normalmapping in your game and are doing so for assets with a source highpoly baked down to lowpoly, you will need to make 100% sure that your tangent space normalmap bake is performed on a triangulated model, and that this very specific triangulation used for baking is the EXACT one that the game will eventually use. If not you will get shading artefacts - hardly noticeable on organic models, but very apparent on hard surface assets. This means that in the specific scenario of game assets baked from highpoly, you will need to rely on a Triangulation modifier applied on top of your asset, turned on before final game export (after rigging for instance) and for baking.
(Another practical example of this, not related to normalmapping : some time ago I was working on a game in which you could edit your avatar with morph targets between skinny and muscular. The skinny version was created from the muscular version by moving things around, to ensure that the vertex index would remain unchanged… However the game engine glitched out during morphing because the diagonals between vertices were different on the two models, because Maya (!!) decided to interpret them differently based on curvature. This was fixed by applying a triangulation node on top of the source character under the morph node, thus forcing triangulation in place.
And last but not least, quads are important for subdivision modeling. But that’s a bit of a different topic.
You must distinguish between the workflow and the end result. You better deliver a tri mesh to Game engines for several reasons. Pior already named some. And you better work with quads for several other reasons, which are also mentioned by him already. You loose for example the ability to use all the edgeloop tools when you work with tris.
Work with quads. When done triangulate the mesh. And have a look where the triangulation went wrong. Then fix this problem zones. And then you can export the tri mesh to your game engine.
Historically most game engines couldn’t deal with quads. It was a technical limit since those engines worked pretty close to the hardware. At a level where just tris works. Even Blender works with tris under the hood at one point. Nowadays game engines like Unity can deal with quads. But the importer can still import the underlying triangulation in the wrong direction. There is a fifty fifty chance to do so. Doesn’t matter for buildings for example. But at a game character you can end in wrong shading and deforming behaviour.
Having a few triangles here and there won’t really make a difference, most game engines will automatically convert quads to triangles.
The most important reason to stick to quads in blender is because most of the tools have been developed with a quad based topology in mind, some tools will not work as expected or may not work at all without a quad based mesh.
