Why you should triangulate your game assets (Blender)
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- Опубліковано 19 вер 2021
- In this video, I'll discuss why you MUST triangulate your game assets to avoid issues in other software.
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quick tip, use the triangulate after the weighted normal, and check the "keep normals" button
What does that do?
@@taimurcgi it triangulates the mesh, but with the vertex normals before the triangulate.
Another interesting note is, even though in some cases it might look like it works fine with Ngons in something like Substance, when you bake the textures and import them into Blender, you might notice weird warping of the texture even though the model looks the same. This is because textures are displayed a bit differently depending on how it's triangulated.
If you're just exporting your mesh you used boolean a ton, without thinking of topology after, you'll have a bad time no matter what game engine. So this is just bad practice game dev modeling.
Assuming good topology practices are used, you triangulate because if you use normal maps, the triangle direction is important.
if you bake quads in marmoset and it reads triangulation one way, but Unreal/Unity reads it another way, it could mess up the shading at that area.
lower the verts, faces and edges as possible, helps get as close to your objects original design with as less geometry as possible while maintaining the look and isnt as expensive on the CPU/GPU
Yeah you are absolutely correct,he is just too much depending on boolean's and has pretty messed up topology,but never the less it is a good practice to triangulate in 3d modeling software before export,and like you mentioned before baking.
@@EyefyourGf if u know topology, using Boolean will save u tons of time, especially with good addons (hardops and meshmachine for example). The question is: do people study or understand topology? No, but they still wanna use Boolean workflow. That’s messed up
Bro i think, ngons are okay with flat surfaces....i did that yesterday...i made a model using booleans...and bewel...after that i imported that in unreal...there was no issue...it was completely good
Meh.
Most often if you just use quads and triangles no need modifier imo.
The engine will give the best render.
So only use modifier if ngons.
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thankyou so much i have had marmoset toolbag for 2 weeks now and i had no idea what the issue was but with this video i finally fixed it thankyou!
Much needed info thanks for the video
Okay, what I heard was: Use quads and good topology if you don't want issues.
Doesn't work for all assets because you need to focus on performance aswell.
We only need to triangulate our model after we finished it. We need clean topology when working, if not we can't select loops and model perfectly. That's the point
He used booleans and didn't think about topology, good topology = no issues it's simple
@@Infinity-ki7wi could you explain what good topology means? Because sometimes performance also has a big thing to say in an asset, and all quads can sometimes be a problem.
@@UmarAli-tq8pl good topology hmmm ... the first important rule no ngons sometimes the engine interprets it badly, when the model is just quads, it must be an edge loop, about performance, model can be built with a minimum number of quads and the so-called support edges then model can be a mix of quads and trangs and it works fine :)
When you mentioned they use face weighted normals method in Star Citizen I went looking. They really do! They also do a whole lot of other interesting stuff to optimize. Cool stuff.
they use it but its far from the most effective weighted normals is heavier in terms of mesh sizes this is also one of the major explanation why star citizien is in development hell
Where did you find that info.
Brilliant! Thank you very much Josh ...
Thanks great tip! Now I understand the differences.
Thanks, Very informative !
Okay. If you have quads. Then your good. But if you have n gon workflow. As in more than 4 sides. Then you have Triangulate. Otherwise game engines will triangulate for you. Then you have a very high risk of getting a mess up mesh when importing to that game engine. I think I have it right.
yes your are right, game engines will Triangulate the mesh for you, at least for engines that I use Unity and unreal .
Yes as you would only use ngons for static meshes bc you need quads for animation
I believe if you have baked a normal map on a mesh with nGons then bring it into engine, the engine will triangulate the mesh changing the original topology and tangency, therefore breaking the normal map. So it's important to triangulate pre-bake/export.
@@philmehrart Under no circumstance you would unwrap an ngon model, you would first remove the ngons then uv map it, that's why the industry doesn't work with ngons but you can still use'em if you know what you're doing.
@@Ebani .....hence why I said at the end, "So it's important to triangulate pre-bake/export"
Oh my gosh thank you so much I couldn't figure out this issue.
Oh my god, i saw your model on the Blender group. Now i find out i was already subscribed to you lmao.
Thank you Josh
The same thing when export DAE to sketchup, its better when its triangulated rather than quads. Tris making UV works in sketchup
Thanks for the info :)
Is it bad to have a lot of lines coming from a vertex? I heard that somewhere? This happens when I triangulate in Blender. I have to go back over my whole model and redo a lot of the tris. It's almost easier to do them all manually.
As a simple example. Say I have a square face that is divided into four equal squares. Blender will triangulate with all lines meeting in the center vertex or some random combination instead of, for example, all lines from top left to bottom right.
You could say, in 3D animation in general, there does not exist anything but triangles. Yes we can work with quads and ngons, but that is only how the meshes are being delivered to the user for editing to make all the workflows better. But the software handles everything as tringles, every software does this. So the difference of you exporting your mesh either with only triangles or others polygons is simply in the difference, if the receiver program needs to do any conversion by itself, which can cause issues, or if you are already delivering the final mesh to it. Simple as that.
I am not working as a game developer, but I have to say: Why do so many programs have issues with properly accepting quads and ngons? Since Blender shows them right and the software is open source for ages now and developers know, that many people use Blender these days, it couldn't be so hard to make their program understand Blender meshes properly. If the conversion-orientation of triangles to quads isn't optimal, that would be understandable. But a totally broken mesh is not an issue of triangles VS. quads in general, but a serious flaw in the programming of the receiver software.
blener and every 3d program do a lot of work under the hood to display quads and ngons correctly to you, but yourgpu doesnt care for shit about them. the gpu only speaks triangles and so other render engines simply cant afford the performance cost of fixing the mesh for you. its the same issue with webGL, if you have a 3d model in a website you need to triangulate everything otherwhise faces will collapse
@@andreapiuma5920 I certainly understand, that you can't keep triangulating all the time in real time while the asset is being used, that would eat up lots of ressources, wasted. I was referring to those programs, where you basically implement your mesh into a project, where it gets automatically triangulated once and then getting saved like that in the project. My point was, that it is a very poor performance of some software, when it can't compile quad meshes properly, since recognizing the quad topology should be absolutely no problem for some importer program.
@@marcfuchs6938 the only programs that accept ngons are the ones that are also able to modify the mesh, game engines don't have this features, they are meant to instance prebuilt objects on a scene and build it quickly and send it to the GPU for the rendering. It's not poor optimization on their part. Webgl is the same, it's just a render engine built for the lowest of the lowest performance demands.
@@andreapiuma5920 I have certainly no experience in this field, so I can't know how things actually work. But when he loads the Blender mesh into that other program, it does convert it to triangles, so the conversion is done beforehand and from there on, a triangulate mesh should be saved, no? But in any case, I understand it is always the best idea to triangulate manually, because then you are not up for any surprises.
@@marcfuchs6938 3D is a field that was born and shaped by the technological limitations of the time. We now have enough computational power to render millions of polygons in real time, but for decades developers needed to do so many workarounds in order to balance quality and performance and those practices basically became the standard. It's only in the recent 15 years that the hardware became powerful enough to accomodate the imagination of devs. We are currently witnessing a shift in development but it will be still take some time before the necessary optimizations comes to every aspect of 3d.
Great explanation! Now I understand why it is necessary to triangulate a mesh. Just Curious though, I havn't encounter this issue before when exporting to substance despite having N-gons. Why is that? is it because I'm placing N-gons on flat surfaces only?
When you import a CAD model, or SketchUp model as a saved DAE, it will already be triangulated. So if you're not making any changes, is that model already fit for texturing?
Doesnt blender have a export option checkbox for triangulation that is by default on?
does this also happen when you export as an STL. file ??? if so this could possibly help too
Thx for the video,
I have the impression that the triangulate modifier does not give a good result when two or more similar UVs are tacked on each other, if anyone has a solution? Thank you all
A very important question - Should I use triangulation before or after weight normal?
I was just running several tests with 3dsmax, Maya, Zbrush and Blender. My results so far. It doesn't look like Marmoset Toolbag or Substance Painter is causing the triangulation. It seems like, it's the export from Blender. What basically means, Marmoset and Painter don't automatically triangulate imported geometry.
another note. It could be, that Substance Painter and Marmoset Toolbag do not support Ngons? Like Zbrush? That could explain this problem. In that case, you don't want to triangulate everything. The best would be, to only triangulate Ngons. But I don't think the Blender triangulate modifier can resolve this.
I am surprised that your exported 3D model still was triangulated, despite you never applying the triangulate modifier to your model.
I always apply the modifiers before exporting, but apparently, that isn't necessary. I have learned something new! 😀
Yes, the exporter will auto apply all modifiers if you tell it to do.
Can you please make it clear. So first we model in quads, and then we use triangulate modifier and apply it before texturing? Can we just select all our mesh and press control t to tiangulate? Can we model directly with triangles?
At what point would you UV map though? Do you UV map the low res quad model, then somehow triangulate preserves that map?
Just found your channel, every thing explained so brilliantly, wish could provide tutorials on material nodes also.
Hi Josh - is this only relevant for exporting models with modifiers? Or for every model...? i.e. those that do not have any modifiers? I'm not familiar with exporting for game engines like UE5 for eg.
Unreal engine requires tris. It might convert quads and ngons for you but best practice is to do them before importing to the engine even if you didn't use modifiers in Blender.
Do you need to apply the triangulation modifier?
Does the triangulate modifier messes with your UVs ?
So if I don't get any issues, I can live without it? I'm working on hard surface models and avoid ngons.
why did u export it with fbx can and not obj ?
Hey Josh! I have a small doubt about hops workflow. Is there any way to make any of my cutter's mesh duplicate behave as a normal mesh instead of being a "Cutter"? Might sound weird but what I am trying to achieve is to make a duplicate of one of my cutters and use it as a normal mesh that is renderable and visible. I try to take the duplicate out of the collection and make the visibility from wire to textured but it still does not render as a normal mesh. I can, of course, make a new mesh but I am just making sure if it's possible to do just for speeding up... Thankx
Yeah you select the cutter, press Q go to settings > shade solid. But press ctrl + click so it makes a duplicate and not simply converts the original cutter.
@@njegosvujovic9286 Thank you So much. That was it! :)
triangulate is important even tho the modell looks fine because when having texture you can find 1 or more triangels that has stretched/bugged uv mapping :D
i notice this especially with fbx and dae format obj seems fine, in 3ds max when exporting as fbx format without triangulate it actually shows message about a edge is truned and that is the texturing bugg so i always triangulate when exporting :D but i iknow i should switch to blender hehe :)
i sea, so that's why its always triangles in game-engines.
wonder what else you need to do to prepare models for gaming.
Thank you..
Why did you export it as a .fbx file?
Bro...i just exports the ngons mesh and then imports in unreal engine...and there is no issue...i think unreal triangulates that when we import that
Hi, great vid! If anyone can clear up a couple of things for me I would greatly appreciate it. I have been told in the past to always make sure to use smoothing groups (in maya, hard/soft edges) for strong angle changes, and split the UV islands whenever there is a hard/soft edge transition. The problem is even though I've been trying to use this method in the past I always find I get nasty black seams where I harden the edges, even when splitting off the UV islands. The alternative is just 'smooth all edges' which gives no horrible seams, but the baked normal then has a huge sweeping gradient which I believe is pretty bad? Normal maps have always appeared 'cleaner' when I've baked using SGs, (aside from the seams mentioned.)
I've also been told to triangulate a mesh before baking and then exporting to engine. I understand that triangulation is important for displaying the normal map correctly in engine after doing a few tests, but often the rigger/animator I work with will request a *quadded* mesh over triangulated (easier to quickly select Edge loops, etc.)
Is there a good way of getting around this or do you guys just send them a quadded mesh to rig, before sending the final triangulated mesh over?
oof 11 months
Send the quad mesh to the animators, usually game engines are pretty "coherent" when triangulating meshes (means they are pretty good to make the same triangulation as your 3D software)
As for the baking problem, try using a different software to bake, if you are using the built in substance, it is really bad, or try more curvature to your mesh and high poly. But if you can't do all that, try playing with the max front and rear distance (i use .05 for both, it give me the best baking so far)
I usually only triangulate if ngons.
And yes Im coming from character pipeline. Single triangles on deformed mesh can look weird + harder to work with.
Quite wierd. I never triangulated models in my career, and there were no issues with it at all.
But nice to know that something may happen.
Doesn't it affect the uv or the texturing process?
I'm guessing that after the triang treatment you'll do auto UV. And no, it doesn't hurt textures as long as there are no ngons.
Ok so I'm not a pro, but I've made a game as a school project (and now I'm making a second one) and I've used Substance Painter and Unity and I have never triangulated. I've never experienced this problem with any of my models (with a couple of downloaded ones, but then I remade them myself)
I export all my models without triangulation normally to UE4 and Substance Painter and I never had any issues like that one either, then again I work with only low poly models and I rarely ever use n-gons.
As I understand it, unless you are making a High poly mesh for baking without any consideration for topology, you won't have to bother with triangulating the mesh, it's basically like doing quality control on your asset, it's not a requirement per se.
You should still triangulate your mesh yourself even if it's all quads as it can still cause undesired effects in certain situations if a quad is split the wrong way!
That topology is gonna make animators cry. (if it's on a non-static mesh)
surprised you didn't check the keep normals button?
Why should you remesh with voxels.
Nice to know, but the title should be specific, "Why you should always triangulate your n-gon meshes"
Everyone's bulling ngons but they r good guys, really. Try not to use them in poly modeling, tho, they won't let u add loop cuts. But when doing bool modeling, they r completely fine, never had any issue with them. Just use bevel & weighted normals at the end of the modifier stack and the model is looking good that's it.
Ive been told HUNDREDS of times, not to use Triangles ANYWHERE in Retopology, since i first started trying to learn it, what feels like 25 years ago "suerving hard time, 25 years, btw. Not making love 25 years lol" and now im being told tris are fine on hard surface models? Which is it? Cause im literally gonna pull my hair out.
Anyone? :(
@@Glitch-Gremlinsame, sorry i can't help
But maybe someone will see comments and answer
Also, please tell me if you find out :)
@@lizardltd This is one of those problems where if you came out with a comment or video saying "it's 100% PERFECTLY FINE to use Triangles" everyone and their dog would come out to tell you exactly why its wrong, and how to do it right. but if you ASK the question? not a Soul. but i did find out on Flippednormals youtube account apparently its fine, just don't use them in areas with "High Deformation" so Organic Models, basically. but on Non Animated Assets? apparently its perfectly fine. go figure.
@@Glitch-Gremlin thanks!!
Should I triangulate for unreal engine too?
Yes. UE uses tris.
Thats a thiccc fucking door holy shit
If we should triangulate a mesh....then why to maintain topology? There is no point of topology then? Please answer someone
Topology is always important man. It’s not about being triangulated or not, it’s about not having weird angles and making UV unwrapping correctly, besides the fact that it is easier to add details later. If you wanna put some nice textures and more complex ones topology is the key for that. It makes things a lot easier.
@@danielbarros8299 but after that...triangulation destroys that topology?
@@3dxcrazyindia822 not at all. That’s just how softwares calculate your meshes (don’t know the technical stuff, but of there’s a reason for painter or Unreal to triangulate). So no, it won’t destroy it. The advantage of making quads is that they are easily triangulated, but it’s not a rule of course
@@3dxcrazyindia822 but that’s what Josh said. It’s better for u to triangulate because the other softwares have their parameters and they can destroy your meshes (usually not, but may happen sometimes)
@@danielbarros8299 oh..okay understand 👍, thanks
are you telling me that I don't need to uv unwrap if I triangulate before moving into substance painter!?
Triangulation has nothing to do with uv mapping, unwrapping can be done automatically by both Blender and SPainter but if you want the best results you gotta do it manually, just like retopology.
@Hay_M But substance painter uses UV maps...so how does this work?
@@Ebani But if I UV map in Blender, and then triangulate in blender via the modifier, my UV map will no longer be accurate, right? Since the triangulation actually changes the faces...or am I not understanding correctly?
@@spinner735 It shouldn't unless you're doing something else as you wouldn't be affecting any vertex so no reason for it to change
@@Ebani hmm interesting...i see what you are saying. I will have to try it out when I have some time. unfortunately 3d is a hobby that i dont have much time for, but i love keeping up with the videos when i can to scratch the itch a little :)
So, really, this isn't so much about "Always export models with a triangulate modifier" as it is "Don't use n-gons when modelling."
Does this apply to: Blender --> Roblox ?
I'd super appreciate if anyone that knows would reply to this and let me know. Big thanks :) !
I heard even leaving quads in your model, especially if it's animated, is asking for trouble. Blender may have a quad where the diagonal line when triangulated runs from topleft to bottomright corner of the quad, while your game engine may do it from topright to bottomleft corner, messing up the animation. Like when you bend a knee and look from behind, it usually is a horizontal line where the shared line of the tris meet. But the engine may render it vertically, making it look like a muscle or deformity of the skin.
It only means that Marmoset is bugggy DAAA. Whe I export my assets from Maya to Unity I never ever had this kind of problems. Change Marmoset to something better duuuude 🤣
I can't believe how people still get so bent out of shape about ngons. It's all very well to say "ngons bad, don't use", but if you are using a boolean workflow you will absolutely end up with ngons. It's totally unavoidable. If you dismiss the boolean workflow as somehow philosophically impure, that's up to you. You are, however, restricting yourself to a mere subset of modelling techniques. There is a ton of stuff that you can do with booleans that is literally impossible without them.
I completely agree with this, quads are good in general, but there's many reasons why Tris are just as beneficial including the fact that many people don't realize that game engines actually render everything in Triangles anyhow to super-speed up the drawcall and rendering process.
Honestly bad advice. This seems like a bug in Marmorset, or bad ngons in your model, any nonbroken ngon should easily be fully triangulatable by any model authoring tools. Check if you maybe need to cut some very complex ngons to workaround marmorsets triangulation limitations? If you manage ngons well, and the software you use isnt broken, you wont have these issues as all.
Also, models will _always_ become fully triangulated by the game engine when the model asset is in its final renderable step, since triangles is the only thing GPU hardware knows about. Triangulation isnt something artists should have to do manually or even think too much about. Once you triangulate a model that you intend to keep on authoring, you basically break and limit the geometry into a state where you no longer can work with the geometry in the intended way.
/Not an artist though technically versed game developer, and have written my own game engine
So, it means game engines completely optimises models for itself? I mean, they make it in most optimal and less resource costly way?
The thing is, once you start fixing your ngons as you have said to have no issues, that is basically the same thing as doing what Josh does. It's just that he uses to triangulate Blender beforehand and you won't. I can't think of any n-gon modeling that won't require manual labour. If so, it's the same thing as the topic in the video. Given that the game development requires fast paced production, worrying less about the manual labour and doing the triangulation beforehand, you save time without doing too much retopo and get it working for the rest. The geo in that mesh doesn't look pretty and it doesn't have to be. If it works, then it's game ready mesh. At least it's a way of approach, but it'd be false to say it's a bad advice. You sacrifice pretty much nothing.
@@danyort1014 GPUs only know how to render trianglws, so game engines have to triangulate at some point. Its very common that they also optimize and generate lods etc
@@Wardson No its not. You can still have ngons (where N is quite high), though you shouldnt abuse them, and you should understand how and why triangulation of them are problematic. Adding 4 cuts to a huge ngon with a hole/cave in it, to create 5 ngons instead, is far from the same thing as completely triangulating your geometry. If its in a model authoring tool, it shouldnt be triangulated.
@@perkele1989 I understand that it isn't the best approach always (in fact it isn't at all for any animated mesh as we all know) but it definitely saved me massive amounts of time on the meshes that had a lot of details. Sometimes it isn't just cutting 4 cuts or practical solutions, sometimes it's a pain in the butt for going deep down and doing knife cuts on the smallest ngon details just cause they fail in baker. It depends. If your mesh has decent details and has good geo then you might not do that. But big models with lots of detail is definitely worth doing triangulation before hand. Like I said, you sacrifice little to nothing doing that.
You won't run into this problem in unreal engine
:o
I used to bake all my texture maps without triangulating in Blender and it would always look just a little off when I imported my textures into Substance Painter... Come to find out that Triangualation is very important even when you have a "Clean", no n-gon mesh if your models are particularly low poly... Because when you export your model it automatically gets triangulated like you said... And yeah if the triangles aren't lined up exactly the same as they are in Blender... The normals cause weird shading...
This is something I was doing wrong for years and just learned a few months ago! >_
Is this the reason why star citizen is so badly optimized?
I'll save everyone 4 minutes and say this:
ALL game engines triangulate meshes. If they don't, you will have to triangulate anyway. The reason you'd want to triangulate them beforehand is for control over the triangulation.
You don't need any other reasons, it is that simple.
Ngon based workflow? What is that? Do you mean modeling like shit?
if you have ngons... your'e lazy.
so because software sucks I need to triangulate in software which doesn't suck 🤣
Nop..... not the complete story...to make it sound like he found gold.
Could you explain then?
Judging by the example, this isn't a tri vs. quad issue, it's just shitty/ lazy modelling. Learn why ngons suck & when you can overlook them before preaching tris as a Holy Grail.