Mixing high with low poly counts in the same model

[Claudius]

Hey guys,

I’ve been asking a lot of questions in this forum, haven’t I. lol

But I love it cause I’m learning so much, I thank all of you guys for the patience.

So, I have this rigged character and, looking at it, I can notice that the density of polygons is much higher in it’s neck than it’s in its torso for example.

Because of this, I wonder if it’s a good idea to increase or decrease the number of polygons in parts of my character depending on the amount of details that area requires. If I make sense.

If so, how should I do that? Will I have issues with mesh deformation if I do that only by selection the faces of the regions I want to have more or less details and subdividing/un-subdividing them?

Like so:

I’ve never seen anyone doing it this way so I guess it’s wrong. lol

So, what would be a better way of adding polygons to certain parts of the mesh in a way that they’ll harmonically and correctly merge with the rest of the mesh’s polygons? Thank you.

[bandages]

No. It is, generally speaking, a bad idea. The person that made that model just subdivided the torso while it was a separate part, and didn’t feel like retopoing the join, so they just left it like that. They were a little bit lazy is all. (Which can be okay. Be as lazy as you can be and still get the renders you want.)

[moonboots]

I would rather remove edges in order to lighten the mesh, but it would mean making sure that it won’t deform the mesh. You can easily remove edges with tools like Checker Deselect as explained here. But if the amount of polygons doesn’t cause any lag, and if your mesh doesn’t show any artifacts, why not leaving it as it is?

[0451]

This is one way to reduce the amount of loops from one area to another.

You can also use something like this for a if you need only to reduce few loops cleanly.