Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2010/08/22/be-vewy-qwiet-im-hunting-tris-again/

let's flush them tris out

As usual the latest renders and the blend file for this spaceship is at the dedicated game spaceship model project page.

I’m aiming for a completely triangle free model. I’ve been reading my offline ebook of theBlender documentation wiki and I discovered that it is possible to select all the triangles on your model from the selection menu.

I’ve heard in a few places now that for games triangles on your mesh are bad, your mesh should – if possible – consist entirely of quads. In theory when you use the triangle select option not a single triangle should rear its ugly head.

Well guess what happened when I selected the triangles on my spaceship model. That’s right it lit up like  Christmas tree!

triangles, and lots of 'em

It’s not as bad as it looks and it’s actually quite fun finding a solution that will turn each triangle into a quad. I can often do it by reducing the geometry on the model in fact, so it has become part of the simplification process. But it’s a job that has to be done. Apparently with all these triangles any game engine that has to draw this spaceship on the screen is going to be producing shading artifacts. So here’s to zero triangles.. sometime soon.

I have also been producing some details which fit into a single quad. With just four vertexes at each corner these details are really easy to duplicate and pepper all over the surface of the spaceship model.

single quad mesh greeble

With little bits of easy to attach eye candy like this the greebling process should be over in a jiffy.

integrated into the mesh