Why is video game topology so WEIRD? (Read pinned comment) 

UPDATE: First of all, this is the most active comment section I've ever had for a RU-vid video. And I can't thank you all enough. Even if your comments are "negative," I truly value feedback and have a desire to improve in any ways I can. That said, a lot of you have pointed out stuff that I wasn't aware of. And I wanted to address that here. 1. As it turns out, your model will get triangulated automatically if you import it into a game engine (such as Unity, Unreal, etc.). As an aspiring game designer, I feel like an idiot for not knowing this. I assumed that these models were triangulated manually by a 3D artist when in reality it's the game engine that has triangulated the model. 2. Game engines aren't the only ones who like their models to be made of triangles. BLENDER DOES AS WELL. What I have demonstrated here: 3:00 is actually what all quads and ngons look like under the hood. Blender (and other 3D programs as well) essentially just trick you into thinking that you're working with quads to make your life easier. What's funny is I've unintentionally demonstrated this at 4:30 where the plane can only deform like that if the software saw it as two triangles. And my dumbass was completely oblivious to this. I'm well aware that this video's reception is rather...mixed. And I apologize to those who didn't have an enjoyable experience from watching this video. But I had learned a lot from you guys and I will try my best to improve in the future. This is probably the most technical subject I'll ever cover on this channel, which is probably why it got the most stuff wrong. Thus, the next couple of videos will cover more general topics. Once again, thank you all for your feedback and stay tuned.

Hey ! Game artist student here ! Actually, the specificity of video game topology isn’t in the triangles… because cinema models are all triangles too ! The fact is, most if not all polygon rendering engines, real-time or pre-rendered use only triangles. And your models in blender are no exception, they are triangles too under the hood. That’s the reason your quad looks like two triangles when you move a vertex making it non planar. The reason your models are displayed in quads in blender is, as you said, that’s easier to work with, and, as you guessed, we work mainly with quads too. But the reason the videogame models you get are all triangulated, is because it will get triangulated anyway when rendered, so either the artist or the engine pre-triangulate the model before importing so the engine don’t have to do it at runtime. But we effectively have our own topology requirements to reduce and optimize the polygon count. Having triangles isn’t a big deal if it allows to reduce the polycount and doesn’t create problems when baking or animating (I think one of the reason it is considered as something bad in pre-rendered is because it messes up the lights when using tools such as the subdivision modifier, but I may be mistaking). We don’t have to create a 100% homogeneous topology : if a part of an object needs more topology to deform or to represent is volume, and an other could just be a quad, we won’t bother dividing it. In the same vein, we might add topology just where a model needs to deform. We also have no problems deleting face no one will see. These topology requirements are mainly for the low poly models. We also often create high poly models, by sculpting or with smooth poly modeling to bake details onto the low poly mesh via normal and AO maps.The requirements are different, but you won’t see these models in game as they are used only for the baking

Alright let me tell you a secret that I discovered... It's All triangles. All of it. Every quad, every ngon, every mesh, all of it is triangles. It may look like a quad, but blender registers it as two triangles. The "triangulate quad" button is the default shape of what the mesh actually is. Blender doesn't really tell you the truth about quads.

The right answer is : GPUs have been optimized to process textured triangles for 25 years. The only exception was the sega saturn, that had a 3D chip that was optimized for quads, but this made it more complicated for coders (and artists, remember in these days, going over 500 faces for a model was a luxury, therefore, using a triangle to fill a hole is 100% ok). In either case : Modeling with quads just makes the artist's work easier, with the correct arguments you used. All quads are then triangulated when exporting the model to your prefered format. If you are a prefectionist, you can actually triangulate some quads beforehand, just to keep control of which way the diagonal goes.

Hello! Awesome video! As a professional 3D artist for games I'd like to add a few things: 1 - we do not always triangulate our models ourselves in this manner before sending them to the engine as many engines such as Unity and Unreal do that by themselves on model at 0 cost since It's import process (dunno about Godot tho), most of these models since you've extracted them straight from the engine could be either the Engine's work or the artists, we can only guess, but ultimatelly usually all models ingame will look so in the end one way or the other. 2 - As you've mentioned in 4:23, sometimes quad topology gets weird surface bendings depending on how the vertices are pointed, there are 2 ways of subdividing a quad (left to right or right to left) so the programs choose one by themselves virtually for rendering be it the modelling software even if you can't see the edge line, leading to hole-like deformations in the silhouette of the model depending on the angle you look and how you want the surface to look like, So we can sometimes do that triangulations our own way to avoid the software making bad decisions. 3 - Adding triangles here and there (If you know where to place them correctly) can diminish the amount of faces by one less edge LOOP in some reagions of the mesh, may not look like much but when you consider how many faces does you're model take till it completes a loop It might be very handy, and help to get away with that nice detail without making the mesh really heavy por it. 4 - Generally N-gons and misplace triangles can create shading issues and bad deformations in animations, but they tend to not create those if the surface they're in is completelly flattened out and is not meant to ever bend down the middle (Hard Surface go Brrrrrrt). The only other problem would be there's more ways the engine would choose to cut those n-gons, but again: if the above conditions are met, who cares, no one will ever be able to see.

answear: everything is already a triangle to the computer

3D artist here. Game models, even the ones you showed, are made using quads, they are rigged using quads, textured using quads, etc. The absolute most important aspect of having good topology is it enables models to deform (twist, bend, inflate, emote) the right way. Under the hood it gets tessellated and converted to triangles so the engine can render them efficiently. The Mario and Master Chief models you showed there are triangulated because they were ripped from their game files, but the artist working on them still work on the untriangulated ones.

Non-planar quads are always rendered as two triangles, since there needs to be a ‘crease’ between one set of opposite corners. This is amplified the lower your detail is, ie. The less polygons you have, and the more visible individual edge creases are. In some cases, such as at a joint, one diagonal crease placement looks subjectively better than the other. Therefore it is desirable, especially in a game context where models might have a stricter triangle budget for performance reasons, to manually set triangles so that the diagonals flow as is desirable, instead of it being done automatically which is not guaranteed to use the ideal configuration.

Press Alt+J in Edit Mode for go back to quads

GPU optimisation has been centred around triangles for a long time. On top of them being dirt cheat to render, they also provide more accurate lighting data then quads.

This is something that’s bugged me for years, but as soon as you moved a point on the square and it made a weird shape it all made sense! Brilliant!

As many here have already discovered, a game engine triangulates each model when importing. It is therefore advisable to archive the original in case changes need to be made. Exporting the model from the engine in order to edit it is not a good idea, because with the salad of triangles, changes to the model and the texturing are often difficult or impossible.

As a few people have stated, the reason why the models are triangles is because tris get generated from quads. When planes get a vertex moved and become "non planer" the shading has a really odd time trying to find the "normal" of a face and you end up with two tris shaded but technically a "quad". This is because blender and every quad commonly seen are Triangles. The reason for modelling in Quads is as you stated Edge flow, sub-D and UV Wrapping. But once it passes through an engine it *normally* gets triangulated. The reason why the mario isn't quad and instead dual tris is because this probably wasn't the model before it went into the engine and probably had been extracted from the game files/engine. Thus it would have already gone through triangulation. There are some very good reasons to use tri topology when doing low poly deformation in joints like knees or elbows to stop pinching behaviors. In any case love the production value on the video, really well produced.

It's worth pointing out that, mathematically, getting a 2D quadrilateral ("quad") from a a set of 4 vertices and edges in 3D isn't well-defined. If the 4 vertices happen to be coplanar, you can use the unique quad that lies on this plane. But if not (which is almost surely the case for generic points), there's no way to tell what the 2D surface would look like, it can be anything you want (including the possibility of curves and whatnot). So you can't really render something that isn't determined to begin with. Dividing every such quad into two triangles (each of which is *always* coplanar) is basically the simplest way to specify what you want the surface to actually be. Also worth noting that if the quad does *not* lie on a plane, you can choose to triangulate it along either of the two diagonals, and each choice will lead to a different surface. So that is a choice that actually has to be made at some point.

Triangles are simpler to raster because ther "fragments" (fragments are translated to pixels later) never overlap, in certain instances, quad fragments may overlap their fragments, so their rendering is not as optimal, despite the fact that rendering quads often offer better results, as their seams align perfectly with the shape, unlike triangulated quads whose middle seam can be noticed if the shape has few triangles, this was specially noticeable in Saturn vs PSX games

Thank you for this! I'm an animator & game graphics designer student and was always wondering why the triangles were to be avoided when creating topology for a model.

What if the model makers did use proper topology, but they didn't use Blender? Ultimately, models are stored as triangles... so if you loaded a regular model into Blender, it would obviously look like they used triangles for everything. It is sort of like compiling a program written in Rust, decompiling it, and wondering why the person wrote the program in C.

As some guy that I completely forgot who they are once said: "GPU speak triangle"

One of the reasons is also that the texturing program they probably use is also going to triangulate the mesh upon importing as substance painter does, wich ensures that the normals are not going to be changed somehow, usualy i always triangulate my models before importing them into substance cuz substance dosent have to triangulate the model while importing wich can take some time depending on how complicated the model is from what ive experienced

All polygons can be broken down to triangles.

Usually, when a model is exported, it’s going to be triangulated by whatever program exports it. In blender, you can use the triangulated modifier, or go into edit mode and select all , and then hit Control+ T , to guarantee your model will triangulate the exact same if imported into engines, or other programs. When you’re importing into blender or other programs, you will get the already triangulated model, because it was triangulated when initially exported. The folks modeling these characters likely already did quad modeling. There’s rare cases where truely weird triangles are there on purpose like in guilty gear. The mouths use triangles for stretching

My university really drilled it into us that NGons are the devil, one of my lecturer's always referred to them as "Satan Squares" and would fail us automatically if she found even 1 NGon, suffice to say we learned really quickly that we should never have them. Also, the switch to all trigons for video game meshes was also a bit of an adjustment ngl, since we were only allowed maybe a handful of trigons in our scenes and models ever. Then we started optimising for video games in our 3rd year and all that went out the window xD

The main reason why it's all triangles is because you are not using the official model Nintendo worked with, you are just seeing the triangulated version for use inside the game. This is done to ensure that you get the same topology output going from your modeling software to your game engine. Also, game engines only understand triangles, like any other modern software, so it's a requires step.

triangles are processed faster by the cpu and also the shaders are calculate din the vertex frame buffer. most of the professional AAA games do all calculations inside the custom interpolators assigned to the custom buffer calculated in the vertex shader which is precompiled and a lot faster.

Reminder to @magic cyborg "There are no stupid questions". Please keep this video up despite the negative comments. Heck, you should make a part two showing your latest discoveries.

Intentionally turning some areas of your mesh into triangles helps with random flipping of edges. Which as you had briefly mentioned can affect lighting in some way. Turning a quad into a two triangles tells rendering software and engines that this is the only orientation you would like to see on that quad. This also helps for the same reasons in deformation of the mesh. Intentionally folding two triangles in a specific direction. Like if you needed a nicely folding crease in the cheek when someone smiles. Don't worry about getting things wrong. There is a lot of information out there and we are all still learning. Thanks for sharing your video. Also, although all models may end up being processed as triangles, I would say its a nearly 100% common practice to make models in quads. Just flat out easier to work with , update, iterate and hand off to others. Working with or editing someone's pre-triangulated model is in fact a nightmare. ;)

Interesting thing, I very recently started learning 3d modeling, and watched many tutorials about perfect topology. But watching video game documentaries, I ofter noticed that weird topology triangles when they showed models from development prices. In that moment I thought why they look like that when everybody is telling about quads. And now I suddenly came across this video. As always, RU-vid is reading the minds 😄

Sega Saturn only did Quads back in the day. Everything else does triangles

Models are triangulated for the engine, but quads are used for animation and proper shading on rounded shapes.

i'm pretty sure that game models just don't store information about quads and stuff. when you use quads even in blender, it still renders them as 2 split triangles. the thing is, when you extract a game model it simply doesn't store which triangles formed the quad so all you see is the triangles that your computer is Actually processing

Just so you know when doing stuff in real time performance matters. GPUs only do triangles. A square is two triangles. Squares are two times more intensive. It doesn't do it but it is noticeable. The reason that we see the triangles is because we measure things in triangle count mostly

from my experience it is the game engine which does the triangulation for our models so often it doesn't matter if you use triangles while modeling for video games as they will end up triangles either way. however its common to do some of the work manually as well, as with certain angles the game engine doesn't know if the quad is beinding outwards or inwards which can cause shading issues. this is usally also part of why n-gons are no no as the game engine doesn't know how to properly turn it into triangles. eitherway the video was fine and though you weren't right on everything as said in your pinned comment. but thought experiments like these are generally useful to have as it can help you come to conclusions or improve yourself.👍

It's actually not specific to game topology, because developers DO use quad modeling via apps like Blender or Maya or other things. The real reason it seems specific to games is that when a game is deployed to consoles and such, everything is compiled to run faster on consumer hardware, including meshes. As many have pointed out, all models are converted to triangles before rendering. So by the time people figure out how to extract a model from a BUILD of that game, they're already packed in as a simple optimized triangle mesh, rather than any of those common formats like FBX or DAE or OBJ that 3D modelers will import into something like Blender.

This video may be nerdy, but it’s not silly at all ! I understood everything though I am no image man, but a sound guy. Thank you !!

Polygons are always triangles during render time. A polygon is just displayed without the triangle edge. But its there. You cannot render a polygon witbout rendering its triangles.

The GPU architecture is what really matters. They are literally like made to do triangle math. Fun fact, Nvidia used to have an architecture that favored quads, but they were overruled by the markets and eventually switched to the triangle focused architecture.

I think blender actually uses triangles but it shades based on quads and ngons. A lot of the file formats you use to send it to a game engine reduce quads to triangles anyway as they'll be converted to triangles to be sent to the GPU anyways. One thing about ngons is that not all 3D software will handle them. If you send an obj file to Zbrush for instance you'll have to fill in holes in your model.

please actually talk to a game artist the next time you make something like this, you're basically just assuming a bunch of stuff in this video from very limited knowledge

A quad is still basically two triangles without a visible diagonal line. Quads are a good representation of the surface orientation to the human eye. The computer does not see quads like humans. The computer on the other hand sees a quad as 4 points (vertices) in the shape of two stacked triangles. The calculations used to determine the distances between any other vertex would be trigonometry. As a human, I would be able to represent the orientation of each vertex in a predetermined scale with an x y and z plain manually; then plot the results out on a spreadsheet. The only methods I would use is trigonometry, and some calculus to check on volume preservation. These calculations in the Billions, would take me a lifetime to calculate manually.

Just use tris to quads. It's right below triangulate faces in the dropdown. It doesn't always work perfectly, but it usually works. Game models are triangulated beforehand partially because some game engines simply don't support quads and partially because if the game had to triangulate them while loading them it would just take way longer to load. Blender just triangulates on the fly for rendering anyways.

Fun Fact! The Sega Saturn was capable of rendering quads in video games, and did so for many games; likewise Nvidia's first graphics card, the NV1, was also capable of quadratic rendering, and did not support polygonal rendering, but because every game on PC up to that point used polygons, and with no name and very little interest behind them to push ports (only a couple were made) they were forced to drop quadratic rendering and use polygonal rendering like the rest of the industry.

Thanks for sharing, even I knew that but it wasn't that clear.

Quads make subdivision modeling easier and cleaner (and are more efficient than tris). Only some game engines require 3-sided polygons. SEGA has at least one arcade board that supports quads (and apparently so does the Dreamcast).

Thanks for sharing but. Why triangles are okey but n-gons are big no?

I just realized you have 732 subscribers. You deserve way more dude

Hey, this is actually a good video because it shows how one might think about this without understanding the hardware. The comment field is full of good information as well! Then when you really go into detail the shape of the triangle and in particular, its length to the primitive block size of a rasterization block, it gets another level of complexity. If you have to consider the drawing of 8*8 blocks of pixels for just a pixel or two for several long triangles, it gets taxing for the engine. Cannot actually find information on the block level size anymore, but this used to be true at least :D

The thumbnail is misleading. Both, Games and cinema renderings are using triangles.

So triangle are used because it's the lowest amount of vertices to make a shape. Hence GPU are designed for triangles.

1:04 - most of all - rigging/skinning is easier! Tomb Raider - is the mother of triangle so.. triagnels is for math quads for artists

Sometimes, negative comments are the most valuable, and another times are just bullshit...

Rendering always breaks Quads into Tris. You can see this by bending a quad & looking at it at different angles to find the extra edge. A video game model just has this & all other operations finalized.

Blenders quads are actually triangles under the hood. GPU can only render triangles.

The easy answer: Triangles are all that 3D GPUs can render, because any shape can be reduced to triangles. That's like CPU can only handle bits, as every numeric value can be expressed as a series of bits. So if you feed a GPU quads, they will actually split those quads into two triangles before rendering. By directly feeding triangles, the GPU doesn't have to perform that step which saves a bit of rendering time and thus you can use more vertices per scene. The more complex answer: With modern GPUs, you don't always want to draw triangles. Modern GPUs support hardware tessellation, and you can even write your own shaders to control how the tessellation is done. Tessellation means (quoting Wikipedia): "In computer graphics, tessellation is the dividing of datasets of polygons (sometimes called vertex sets) presenting objects in a scene into suitable structures for rendering. Especially for real-time rendering, data is tessellated into triangles". This is done dynamically, so you can create fewer triangles on weaker GPUs and more on stronger ones, making the best use of the graphics processing power of the system underneath. So in some cases you don't want to statically convert more complex polygons to triangles when you export your 3D models for a game, you want to do it dynamically at runtime. You can still perform tessellation even if your model has already been converted to triangles, but you will get better results the more information the GPU has available, and a triangle is already reduced to the bare minimum of information needed for rendering. The information about which of these triangles originally made up a single polygon (e.g. which two of them made up a single quad) is no longer available when you are left with only triangles. Tessellation on just triangles can only smooth surfaces, it's like smoothing a compressed video to make some compression artifacts disappear (but information that's gone is gone and cannot be recovered). Tessellation on more complex polygons, on the other hand, can actually decide at runtime how much detail to keep or remove (this is like dynamic video compression, where the amount of compression is scaled to the power of your CPU at the time of viewing).

Thank you, sir, I was really confused why game uses triangles at first place. I can't thank you enough.

Why just one diagonal? Why isn't this an 'x' if there can be a fold in the other direction, as you demonstrated?

Quads are used for meshes that's getting subdivided ob render, having all tris model would screw up subdivision, but when you making game you need to have good shape and deformations without things like subdivision surface, so you need to use triangles to make the best shape, and in engine model are getting triangulated anyways.

uhhh... but N-gons can be used for transitioning the topologies, proper redirection of it or for the UV... It does nothing wrong on flat surfaces.

I've got a fairly short attention span, so where possible I like to speed up a video as fast as I can process the information (most times 1.75x -- and sometimes 2x) -- Even though you have a fairly slow delivery, this was the first time I decided not to speed up. (Like of course if I'm watching a movie, or something entertaining, I don't speed those up, but anything with information and talking in it). I think it was partly your "animations", I liked the fact your little robot avatar changed expression fairly frequently which made me want to watch it more carefully. Anyways thanks for explaining topology, because I didn't ever really know what it was.

RU-vid recommended this video to me because i love 3d modeling

still one issue you have not moved and more specifically decimate modifier. Once you finish creating a model and for example it has 40k triangles including clothing, you use decimate modifier before exporting. This allows you to reduce the number of triangles by up to half without losing a lot of detail and shape of the model which you would not achieve by reducing quads alone. Shading tends to get weird but then the normal map comes in.

its a same thing that sorta like someone reinvented a wheel; spend some time not a whole lot to document it and writing a blog post with short paragraphs about "how exactly do wheel work" as a title, is like on the browser that got a quite long side scrollbar then scroll down little bit then the end of the page . well hypothetically i could go blender org simply create a quad sphere export the file, transfrom the file format the way i want, code the program to read my file, code to buffer to draw some triangle to become 4 edge face some 3d calculation inside my opengl, code a shader 'property' to render my sphere out, so after all, what games is missing now is someone gotta figure out how to implement something like "Shade Smooth" function similar on blender inside their games and also figure a way to optimize game performance

quads internally are triangles so it is a natural conversion, probably the models were made with quads but automatically changed

A really good video. A very solid overview of the topic of topology. Keep up the good work. Now, I see you have found your way into the start of understanding triangle strips and triangle fans. As it turns out, all quods are just two triangles in a trench coat that act like a square. In fact, you see this in play at 4:24. You're also correct about triangles' ability to be planer at any point in space. One reason this is important is because it helps to calculate the normal vector. By taking the vector of two edges from a vertex. You can calculate the cross-product of the two and get a vector that is perpendicular to the planer axes. By normalizing this vector's magnitude, you can find its normal vector. In blender terms, turning on the normal display (edit mode, viewport overlays, normals) you can see this. These are used by the shader to calculate lighting and the way the object is facing. A face facing away doesn't need to be rendered. In rendering, this is called back face culling. By this one calculation of getting a normal vector, games can often gain about twice the performance as they would have because they can skip a lot of rendering. With that said, on the 3D modeling side. Working with quods is much easier because of the subdivision surface algorithm. By finding the halfway point of all edges, you can add a new vertex in that position and recalculate a new edge. Because two triangles make up a quod, it can also find the halfway point of that shared edge. Allowing it to now have nine vertices, easily making 4 quods. Because of their widespread usage, most graphics libraries, like OpenGL and DirectX, kinda just assume you are using triangles for everything. As such, blender tessellates all its quods into triangles anyway. However, the concept of quods is very useful for some algorithms that help with modeling, and as such, it's the reason why n-gons and/or triangles are unwonted. As these algorithms don't work for these types of meshes. Sorry about the long comment. I write a lot of graphics code. Plus, it's fun to talk about these topics :P .

The issue is when you export from game engine and want to tweak in blender.

Actually the GPU automatically turns quads into triangles for rendering, but having them be triangles already makes it a bit quicker. There’s something called the tessellation shader that does this, so theoretically you could have a game that only uses quad meshes

You're ALSO using a mesh with triangles only in Blender (and other most 3D modeling and CAD software), it's just the software is lying to you, the "quads" get triangulated so they can actually get rendered in the viewport, so it's actually a "video game mesh" since viewport renderer is using directX/OpenGL/Vulcan, same API video games use and there are specific rules on what type of mesh it will accept, unless its some custom CPU rendering solution like Zbrush, what is is the viewport is a "video game mesh" with fake quads superimposed on it, it is to make modeling easier.

1:22 "Hohoho boy im gonna sue the sht out of..." - Nintendo

here's something interesting: the DS actually supports quads!

Those look like quads converted into triangles

so what you're saying is... life is a triangle

NEVER triangulate your assets in blender to make it 'game level faster' this is foolish. Quite a lot of the game models are ripped and converted to tris so, your analyzing mesh data that is second hand. For example a person attempting to steal a model from a game likely used a tool like NinjaRipper to copy the geometry from the frame buffer of something like an Emulator. I have worked on some Nintendo game files and they do in fact support storage of geometry in quads. However, it is true that many game engines force triangulation as they might be using a single index list as a requirement for all vertex components to be remapped to in order to take advantage of strips. So in a sense the triangulation is a result of the baking or an optimization process which is automated on the raw assets. Until recently games had to follow a strict polygon budget however, Unreal4 is selling this idea that the engine will sort out mesh optimization on the fly. Which will allow devs to use CG level assets directly in the game without any pre-optimization.

ive wondered about this! nice vid earned a sub

I mean I export my models from blender to unreal engine 5 with good topology and it automatically converts it to a triangle model

before reading the comment I thought that it really is all triangles and nothign else is really posible now turns out that yes this really is the case lol.

The Sega Saturn used quads. It sucked. It's difficult to calculate the texture colors for each pixel. You couldn't do transparency at all. You have to handle edge cases where the vertexes of a single quad create intersecting lines. Triangles don't have any edge cases to deal with.

for true optimization if you have the time is to the tackle the one dimensional world of the stack.

Tessellation?

Will triangles increase performance in Blender?

Well I certainly learned something new today. Apparently this is how to work the comments section into a frenzy: Step 1: Say something naive about game art, bonus points for mentioning Blender Step 2: Profit Seriously, the amount of users who think they have something to prove in this comments section is absolutely staggering.

normaly a quad is two triangles, sharing two vertecies

I loved this video and i love this channel now, keep going!!

As a professional 3d artist both in production and games for 17y , and a 3d teacher in college, i can say that you missed the main issue. You do tuch on many good points and explain very well. But the info is somtimes not accurate. Tldr: in games we dont SubD or use displacement. This is the most important thing. 1. All model everywhere are made of triangles as far as the computer calculations care. We send unity/unreal etc... quad models all the time. The triangulation is many times automatic like you noticed. Mario was modeled with quads and automatically triangulated. We use quads because it makes many things easy for us and the computer. Mainly quads allow edge flow because they have a clear direction. Triangles do not have direction. 2. The main issue in game models is the fact that they do not get subdevided in realtime. With subd models you need to make sure corners are beveld so they stay sharp. This means that game models will not need this extra topo. 3. Because the model is not subdivided we can also reduce and minimize the topology by using smart placement of triangles. And reducing topology on flat surfaces. But.... 4. In order to get round models we sometimes need to add devisions because we dont subd. Or ekse the modrl will look polygonal. So...game models sometimes will have more polygons than a "movie production model". For example: A weapon in a FPS that is big and close to the camers will have more polygons on its round parts than the same weapon modeled for a Hollywood movie. 5. Quad topology alows us to select rows and loops. This is what helps uv, texture, rig, animation. It just makes life easier. The math part is true but not the main issue. Because computers today can deal with many polygons. I can elaborate about this for days...lol

Thank you, man ;)

Without optimization games would run like 90% of unreal engine 5 games released.

Dude. What the hell. Did you even Google it before making a video?

triangle are impotent to vertex color too

Underrated. God Bless you dude! Do you have any playlists or tutorials you would recommend for godoh and blender, I know a bit of blender, but I'm barely dipping my toes into game making

Do I need to manually triangulate models in Blender before importing them into a game engine? Because if I import them as quads, UE5, for example, automatically converts them.

Very good!!

But how do you rig this like when I'm weight painting it's hard to paint around also downloading game models some vertices not connected which is also a problem if i merge them then it's a shading issue, do you know any solution?

:) Quads are easy to manipulate, modify and ari ara, so i guess the pro dudes have this kind of fetiche towards quads because they need model stuff to other people that will modify the models for them own need so it turn ou to be a gold stadarnd that everyone like to use because, yes why not? "Look cools i feel like a pro doing quads" Personaly i like to see triangles everywhere, i always Crt+T my stuff when i finished them, if i wanna some quads to manipulate somehting mor easily i just press Alt+J. Also clean Quads topology help to avoid topology hell, UV is easy, modify is easy, and etc.

whats the name of the soundtracks u used in this vid

arent video game models the same? the quads in retopology get turned into triangles anyways

Pls, just show this video to the 3D artists and creative developers of RoboCop: Rogue City :3

Thanks for you video and research! I may wanna ask a question: if triangle is possible to make computer aka the render faster, is it useable for me to apply them into my model for animation? I do know people would say quads for animate, but somehow everyone knows that not every part need those "quads movement".

wow. this is some high quality content.

This is why I make sure there are 0 non triangle polygons on my models. (except for my old models where I didn't know how to optimize my models)

Please just research the topics you are talking about, first triangles and ngons are fine on hard surface objects, second video game characters or other animated models are in fact made with quads, third you probably just imported the models from game files thus why there are made of triangles because they had to be converted manually or by the engine, fourth everything in 3D is made of triangles even Blender renders using triangles that's just how it works but they are shown as quads or ngons to make it easier to work with, the only places where you will see models not rendered with triangles are CAD softwares which are based on pure math instead of faces, and voxel engines which are literally 3D pixels.

gpus are stupid and are only optimized for rendering triangles. this is also the reason that voxel rendering isnt popular. (Minecraft doesnt count, the blocks are made out of triangles.)

Fun fact: You dont actually need to triangulate your 3D models in any 3D software. Why? Because your models will be automatically triangulated when exported into most game engines ( especially UE5 ) ( not sure about unity ). And yes, games do run better when your CPU is calculating triangles instead of quads or more.