Hello, everybody!
Here is two models of house that made in different ways. Can you help me how to model this simple thing right. Because I’ve heard that triangles is bad for subsurf and at all. And when you doing a loop cut, another sides of mesh become too detailed. I just want to undestand main principle of lowpoly modelling.
Thank you very much.
P.S. If you can, please, post an images for best understanding.
Here’s the thing: low poly modelling is not the same as subsurf modelling. With lowpoly you can have as many triangles as you want, because that is the exact mesh you’re going to be rendering, whether in an offline renderer, or in a game engine. Assuming you’re going to be handling the normals with a normal map, the house on the right is perfectly fine.
On the other hand, when you’re modelling for subsurf, you don’t care all that much about whether some areas have more triangles than others. In fact, that’s how it’s supposed to work - you want more detail in some areas (like edges) than others. You should shy away from triangles but not because they are evil, but because they are hard to work with. For example, triangles on flat surfaces are perfectly fine. If you can get your subsurfed mesh to look good with triangles, that’s great. It’s especially hard to get subsurfed meshes with triangles to work with animation because they often cause pinching that is difficult to predict.
That being said, a house is not a good candidate to use subsurf on. Plain poly-modelling works best here - there are few soft curves in a house.
Also try not to have polygons that have three vertices in a line like above the door. Instead, extrude inward. Note that while you make an extra polygon that way, the number of vertices stays the same. Even when you’re being very, very frugal with geometry in a low-poly model, faces are cheap, vertices are not - a face is just a set of indices to vertices.
This is a great place to start. Take a day and run through these tutorials and I believe your questions will be answered.
Thank you, Mad! Your answer helped me a lot in understanding.
But can you create this staff without a triangles at all? I’ve tried but without a sucсess. Is it possible? I know that Blender works with quadrangles and triangles, so it’s impossible to create five-vertex poly for example.
Great, Mad! And how have u made a volume? Extruding by normals - (alt s) or maybe with solidify modifier?
I see you just extrude window and door
Why would it be bad? No, that’s not a problem at all.
However, bear in mind I’m still considering this as a very low-poly model, where every poly is very important. Assuming this is not an asset for a game engine and you don’t care if it renders in a millisecond or a second, polycounts of hundreds of thousands of polygons are not unusual for poly-modeled architecture, and a scene in blender can easily consist of many millions of polygons. And even realtime engines today can usually handle at least a couple hundred thousand polygons on screen at once.
So if this is meant to be anything more, I’d use more loop cuts and keep as many faces as possible rectangular, so that it’s easier later to alter and unwrap. Like this:
In other words, don’t be so frugal with the polygons, there’s no point outside very low-poly LOD models.
Ok, so I have to make more polygons in the key places for easy modelling. Thank you for information, Mad!
