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Triangles Versus Quads Question submitted by (27 July 1999)  |
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| Some engines use triangles others polys(quads), is there any distinct advantage (speed or easier to work with) of one over the other. | ||
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I personally prefer n-gons (not limiting a polygon to 3 or 4 sides.) When
I switched from triangles to n-gons, I gained approximately a 40%
performance boost. Of course, this will differ with each individual
engine. There are a few difficulties when dealing n-gons. The first is how to store the data. Some prefer to allocate a set of vertices per polygon and limit their n-gons to that many vertices. I've always prefered to use a linked list. They're fast and don't limit the number of vertices. Another problem with n-gons, is where to get the data. Very few modeling tools can ouput polygons with more than 4 vertices, and I don't know of any that can output an optimized set. I wrote my own triangle->ngon optimizer, which really helped, but it was extremely challenging. Response provided by Paul Nettle |
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