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I know about the advantages and uniqueness properties of triangles. However, if the article is correct about that artists prefer using quads when editing (I kno

I know about the advantages and uniqueness properties of triangles. However, if the article is correct about that artists prefer using quads when editing (I know absolutely nothing about 3D editing, and didn't know that, I thought triangles are universal these days), something is clearly missing from the pipeline if a neatly mapping textures to quads, then converted to triangles ends up messing the interpolation. Maybe we can continue to describe the geometry in triangles, but could use an additional "virtual fourth handle point" data (maybe expressed in barycentric coords of the other three, so everything is automatically planar) for stretching the interpolation in the expected way. Anyway, I'm just getting started with Metal, and this provided for a nice theme for experimentation.

badsectoracula 2y ago
Modern GPUs - and really GPUs for about 10 years - are stupidly fast when it comes to rasterizing triangles, so artists simply work with quads (and polygons of more than four vertices - when Blender added "n-gons" back in the day many artists rejoiced) and they just subdivide them if they want neater looking interpolation before triangulating them. But a lot of detail nowadays come from geometry anyway. This could have been nice ~15 years ago when using much fewer poly counts and relying a lot more on textures for detail was more common. But at the same time, GPUs were also much slower so this approach would be slower too. So in practice this is really a niche approach for when you want to have a large quad that isn't "perfectly" mapped to an underlying texture and you can't subdivide the quad. Nowadays such use cases are more likely to come from more procedural sides (or perhaps effects) of the engine than artists making assets for the game. It might be useful for an artist wanting to use a modern engine running on a modern PC to make a low-poly retro-styled game though.
- GolDDranks 2y ago
  Interesting - low-poly (and 2D) are exactly where my interests are. Btw. wouldn't it be possible in modern pipelines to remap or "disfigure" the texture when converting to triangles, so that it counters the bias accordingly? Ah, but that bakes in the shape of the quad, so it can't be modified runtime or it will get distorted again, right.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
spookie 2y ago
Artists usually prefer quads, but it really depends on what they're doing. It's also not unusual for them to willingly create a model of mostly quads with tris in the mix at the same time. In the end, the representation of a quad in a 3D modelling editor doesn't really matter. Be it an actual quad or 2 tris. Because any sane artist wants every quad to have 1 normal vec, if they want 2 on a quad they will happily use 2 tris instead. It is a non issue. (btw I have done plenty of 3D art for games, I have also made my own vk renderer, I don't see a problem with using tris in the end, even if "visual quads" do de-clutter my work and do help reasoning about the flow of the model at hand)
rnvannatta 2y ago
When you unwrap UVs the interpolation issue is taken care of. The UV map accounts for it. It's only for tessellation like subdivision surfaces where something like this would be nifty That is to say, this is mainly nifty for the DCC tool renderer itself to render slightly faster.

badsectoracula 2y ago

Modern GPUs - and really GPUs for about 10 years - are stupidly fast when it comes to rasterizing triangles, so artists simply work with quads (and polygons of more than four vertices - when Blender added "n-gons" back in the day many artists rejoiced) and they just subdivide them if they want neater looking interpolation before triangulating them. But a lot of detail nowadays come from geometry anyway. This could have been nice ~15 years ago when using much fewer poly counts and relying a lot more on textures for detail was more common. But at the same time, GPUs were also much slower so this approach would be slower too. So in practice this is really a niche approach for when you want to have a large quad that isn't "perfectly" mapped to an underlying texture and you can't subdivide the quad. Nowadays such use cases are more likely to come from more procedural sides (or perhaps effects) of the engine than artists making assets for the game. It might be useful for an artist wanting to use a modern engine running on a modern PC to make a low-poly retro-styled game though.

GolDDranks 2y ago
Interesting - low-poly (and 2D) are exactly where my interests are. Btw. wouldn't it be possible in modern pipelines to remap or "disfigure" the texture when converting to triangles, so that it counters the bias accordingly? Ah, but that bakes in the shape of the quad, so it can't be modified runtime or it will get distorted again, right.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

spookie 2y ago

Artists usually prefer quads, but it really depends on what they're doing. It's also not unusual for them to willingly create a model of mostly quads with tris in the mix at the same time. In the end, the representation of a quad in a 3D modelling editor doesn't really matter. Be it an actual quad or 2 tris. Because any sane artist wants every quad to have 1 normal vec, if they want 2 on a quad they will happily use 2 tris instead. It is a non issue. (btw I have done plenty of 3D art for games, I have also made my own vk renderer, I don't see a problem with using tris in the end, even if "visual quads" do de-clutter my work and do help reasoning about the flow of the model at hand)

rnvannatta 2y ago

When you unwrap UVs the interpolation issue is taken care of. The UV map accounts for it. It's only for tessellation like subdivision surfaces where something like this would be nifty That is to say, this is mainly nifty for the DCC tool renderer itself to render slightly faster.