Best way to triangulate?

Kroma! · Aug 2014

Hello all, I'm wondering how I should triangulate these edges.

In particular the domed area. Should I be trying to keep a flow going around or try to get it symmetrical? Also, is it a good idea to handle cylinders in this way i.e. all faces from top left to bottom right, not zig-zagging?

Any help would be much appreciated

Eric Chadwick · Aug 2014

Put a specular on there to see, zigzag is generally better, as in a series of M shapes.

Alec Moody explains how this works in his 3dmotive tutorial, with very similar example to your mesh there. See chapter 8. Well worth the price, imho.
http://3dmotive.com/series/normal-maps-tips-amp-tricks.html

Farfarer · Aug 2014

The zig zagging shouldn't be too big can issue if you're using Maya with angle weighting (also got that in my toolkit for MODO).

For Max, yeah, you'll want to try and have the edges connecting to the vert in a symmetrical fashion to even out the contribution from the polygons.

EarthQuake · Aug 2014

Really the exact "flow" is not that important, especially if your asset is using a baked normal map, as the normal map will account (or attempt to) for any triangulation pattern.

Important bits:
1. That your mesh when baked has the same triangulation as your mesh in game (and ideally the same normals and tangent info). If using Maya, you may want to lock normals before triangulating and exporting to the game engine, otherwise your mesh normals will change (this can also be solved by triangulation before baking, but that's annoying).
2. That your triangulation doesn't create convex or concave shapes where there should be convexities or concavities. This is important on non-planar quads, which you may want to manually triangulate.
3. That your triangulation doesn't create one very long, thin triangle and another large triangle. Generally quads should be triangulated along the shortest edge if possible.

Best way to triangulate?

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