Polygon Count

[killstorm37]

Well we hit a amilestone, our first "high Detail mesh with under 7000 Polys, i think the problem is lightwave tends to use 4 sides polygons insead of three. anyway i will upload the mod once windows 7 quits going insane on me, may be a few days.

[throttlekitty]

The final result in-game will be a triangulated model, so how Lightwave handles things up until final doesn't much matter. But to be more precise, what matters more in the end is the final vertex count.

[Ghogiel]

the solution to poly count woes> Bake normal maps from subD models.

the results are superior to any other workflow.

it allows you to use triangles nearly when ever you want for the in game mesh. this in turns gives you great control over vert count. as long as the face smoothing and UV shells are laid out correctly, it'll correct for any smoothing errors you may have from using "bad" topology. Thats kinda the point of doing it in the first place.

 

anther trick for lowering vert count I some times bother with, as you can do all kinds of mirroring in the UV. which gives an over all texel density boost to the model. making it look like it has higher res textures than it actually does. depending if the its mirrored along a UV seam or not, you can weld the verts together in the UV. this saves on vert count. I have dropped maybe 1000 verts off a model by doing that. If the UV is mirrored along a seam.. you will have to offset the UV island(well technically just the verts actually at the mirrored seam) or else the Tspace gets real fonky there, causing a nasty lighting error. I wrote a little article explaining it on falloutnexus.

There are down sides. mirroring the texture down the middle of the mesh looks pooh. and circumstances arise where AO maps can look goofy depending on surrounding geo and the like. and you have to juggle the UVs about when baking, you can't bake onto overlaping UVs. usually, it's pretty obvious what you can get away with in the UV.