@Schuster said:
No..no..every engine converts to tris...GPU...needs triangles for a realtime calculations...I think :) ( I'm not an expert on GPU )..
From what I remember when I was working with OpenGL directly, you have to change quads/Ngons to triangles and send them through a VBO (vertex buffer object) and a VAO (vertex array object). Then you can do some extra stuff with EBO (element buffer objects) and index lists if you want to use indexed drawing.
But as you said, every game engine handles this for you so you don't have to worry about it.
If anyone is curious, I would highly suggest giving the getting started section from LearnOpenGL a look if you want to learn how OpenGL works.
I'll admit that even having read through all of it several times, I can only barely understand the basics now. It's really complex stuff, and I'm just glad there are game engines out there so I don't have to try and manage it all, because I would fail miserably :lol:
@keltwookie said:
But still, and I suppose you already tried Eevee, (I did… wow!), but in case of a real time rendering on Blender, does the rendering engine do the conversion ? Or is it another problem ?
I think blender converts to triangles internally so it can display meshes in the viewport, and then Eevee uses that (which I think is why they had to rewrite most of the viewport code in Blender 2.8). That said, I am totally guessing. It would be interesting to read how they did it for Eevee.
Also, thanks for sharing the article about polycount in games. I found both quite interesting to read, and now I know I don't need to worry nearly as much about polygon count in my low-poly games! I generally tend to remove polygons the player will never see, but sometimes it makes doing the UV maps difficult, and now I know I don't need to worry as much :smile:
