Tutorial : triangulation

[megalmn2000]

Hi all,

this is a technique I learned from my teacher at Ubisoft.
Hope it will help people.

[novaprospekt]

I hate to troll, but I disagree with the knowledge that is laid out in this tutorial.
Having worked very closely with trangluated car meshes on the game Forza 3, (testing surfaces with a cubemap in max to ensure smooth reflections) I have found from my experience that:
-the most important factor in clean triangulation is that the edge (dotted line) be connected to the shortest point within the polygon
-additionally, the triangle should support a convex structure, IE. connecting the two vertices that define the curvature of said polygon most efficiently.
-lastly, the point you have emphasized seems to me to be of little importance when you consider the first two points. If you have satisfied those two requirements than weather or not you triangulate in an opposing or same-direction fashion doesn't effect the in game display much at all. In fact, I would argue that (in your first image example) it is better too have an even distribution of smoothing errors, than having them focused on every-other vertice around the cylinder.
Please enlighten me if I'm mistaken.

[utoptoy]

I read you article ,it give me more information of something ,i will often come here to read your post!

[Perfecto]

The 'no zig zag' method you said is not good will actually render faster on most hardware than the 'triangulated' version you recommend because of tri-stripping. Look it up.

Either way, manually changing the direction of the tris is a massive waste of time and isn't a hard and fast way to sort shading problems out. You triangluate things based on which one looks best.

You sure you heard this from a tutor at Ubisoft?, if so he needs his head looking at.

[Eow]

I've been looking for this kind of information, so thanks! But, how this applies to characters still remains as a mystery for me. Looking at the meshes from the L4D2 characters, I cannot find the connection with what you're showing me on these example. Anyone know where this information can be found?

[Amsterdam Hilton Hotel]

OP, zigzagging like that is less efficient for rendering, takes a while to do by hand, and honestly usually looks worse... I hate to say it, but you seem to have things completely backwards.

[Istanbul]

I will say that it's good to know how to edit triangulation, especially if working in low poly counts. However, I agree that the rest that the function is best used in a limited fashion to max sure any non-planar polygons are bending in the right direction.