You can see on the top of the images in the bar that there’s quite a difference. There’s several ‘issues’ with the original mesh as well.
This all could be really inconvenient when you’re trying to import a ROBLOX mesh and wish to adjust it just a bit or just for perfectionism. I can also imagine that it’d reduce lag with a small amount due to reduced edges and vertices in the improved one.
It’d be sweet if there’s a solution to this! I’m not sure if this is just the exporting though, so if that’s the case, please inform me!
Engines like Roblox render meshes by duplicating all their vertices, thats why the mesh seems inefficient. A mesh in blender may have like 200 verts, but like 400 verts when its imported to roblox. But whats wrong with the head mesh as it is is that theres way too many rings. The head mesh doesn’t need that many triangles.
Btw, since a mesh exported from roblox and then imported blender has all its triangles separated, the way fix that is by selecting everything, removing doubles, and then pressing alt-j. Its gets the mesh to look like it did originally in blender.
Does Roblox actually use/allow n-gon (n>3) faces in meshes? Aren’t they triangulated anyway as a preprocessing step? The most important difference I see in the two meshes here is that one is a tri-mesh while the other is a quad-mesh, but if the mesh is triangulated anyway this won’t have much effect.
They both have the same number of triangles, but theres twice as many edges in head mesh on roblox, which means more vertices that have to be rendered
edit: notice I said triangles not polygons, blender does show the correct triangle count because it calculates the triangles in the polygons, just wanted to make that clear
I understand what your point is, but it seems unlikely to me that they do not use an efficient vertex array. I think it’s just a matter of the export method being “dumb” and dumping vertices per face without checking if the vertices were already dumped to the file, leading to duplicates. That doesn’t mean the mesh internally also has redundant vertices/edges. (disclaimer: I’m not 100% sure, but this seems much more likely to me)
buildthomas is right, quads and N-gons are triangulated anyway so they make pretty much no difference in-game.
For what it’s worth that’s not Roblox-specific behavior. It’s all triangles in the end because they’re much easier for a computer to work with. Quads and N-gons are just an illusion to make them easier for humans to work with.
As @buildthomas stated, the meshes are triangulated by the time they’re in roblox.
Also, modern GPUs are capable of rendering a lot of triangles. Micro-optimizing polycount isn’t really worth the time compared to what else takes time to render.
