Hey, I have been looking at other artists work on ArtStation to give myself guides for retoplogizing a character. It’s for my portfolio so I won’t to use the standard means. In courses I’ve done they used adding poles to create the extra topology on joints that bend. Keeping the all quad topology. On most models I’m seeing now though, it looks like they are using triangles in those areas instead. I will link some pictures to show what I mean. I’m wondering what the benefit is, and what the standard is. My guess is they are optimizing with less faces.
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The normals are probably baked in, in which case it wouldn’t matter so much.
So as for me should I keep the quads?
You gotta do what you gotta do man, if you can make it work with quads, cool, if you can’t, cool.
Stick to quads topology. About as to why people prefer triangles, I can only guess for now. The main reason is that they will get more faces with the exact same number of vertices. If you think of a quad, it has 1 face and 4 vertices. If you cut through it diagonally, it now has 2 faces and (still the same) 4 vertices.
And it seems that it’s lighter in size, because when we export stuff into OBJ or FBX, they use the index of vertices to build up the whole thing. So if you’d like to have double the number of faces, but you intend to keep it light, you can opt for triangle topology.
However, I wouldn’t recommend it.
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When using (relative) low poly and deformation… have look at wiki.polycount Limb_Topology… and game engines almost ever just do tris…
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Thank you for this reply!
For wrinkles, joints, and such you’d want to define in which way or direction the mesh gets triangulated inside the engine. Otherwise, there would be artifacts once the part deforms.
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In fact if i remember correctly in Maya (and/or Studio3Dmax) quads can indeed can keep or been adjusted their triangulation… (if this is needed in any way)…
…in Blender you have to enable wireframe for viewport display and while using a triangulate modifer you have to trianulate specific quads and join again and hope that the new triangulation does fit… like so (all quads here…triangles are from the fixed triangulation from the modifier only):
Or you are good with shortets or longes tpath…