Hello everyone, I just have a quick question as I am investing my time in learning to model for my game due to roblox’s outage and development discord servers are dead. Anyways to get to the title, I just created a pipe piece for my game, it is 1.4k triangles. Is this too much? (there will be many pipes placed in my game.)
The maximum triangle count is around 10K - 12K triangles, so your mesh is fine!
Despite 10K being roughly the limit for Roblox models, less triangles is often better.
Most computers can handle many triangles perfectly fine, although Roblox isn’t the most optimized game engine for rendering highly detailed models and graphics.
Before you make your model, you should consider
“Is my model going to be far away or close to the eyes of the player?”.
If players are going to get very close to your model and you feel like details are important to your game, then having a little more triangles in your model can be a good thing to make your game look a bit more beautiful.
However, if your model is going to be far away, you might want to use as less triangles as possible, what I sometimes do is zoom out on my model and see how much of the tiny details I’ll still see really, a lot of detail can also be “faked” with simple textures.
I recommend removing unnecessary details like bevels if your pipes are going to be far away or if you’re going to have a lot of them. People are only going to see rounded corners and edges from up close.
How many triangles you want your model to be also depends on your art/graphics style.
If your game is low-poly all models can have a small amount of triangles and you let textures do the work and details for you.
If your game is high-poly and you want to use highly detailed meshes, take a little time and consider how close or far away your models are going to be and what the user really needs to see.
Sometimes the back of a model is intentionally left empty or unfinished (think of a statue that is always placed against a wall or the back/inside of a building) to save up on memory simply because the player is never ever going to see those details unless they clip out of bounds.
If players are never going to see the inside of your pipes, you can leave them empty without any triangles, if your pipes are connected to each other, you can leave out the screws and ends that connect to each other as they’re going to get obscured anyways.
These are just some optimization tips, generally the less triangles, the better and faster your game will be.
You don’t have to make use of these methods, that’s all up to you, most computers will deal with this many triangles just fine. But I’m just saying that using these methods can drastically improve performance for lower end computers and devices.
Hope this helps you out! Feel free to ask questions if anything is unclear.
TL;DR
Less triangles = faster rendering.
Do not model details that players won’t see from a distance or certain angle.
Triangle limit is roughly 10K but try to keep it below 2K for character models.
Between 50 - 500 for small props and items.
(Depends on your graphics style/choice.)
You can also use Roblox’s Built-In LoD system.
If your mesh is a “MeshPart” then you can do
MeshPart → RenderFidelity → Performance / Automatic
Oh yes I’m totally aware of this, but I sometimes make my LODs by hand since automation can sometimes completely butcher your models if you still want them to look decent at a distance.
Unfortunately not all game engines have a very good LOD system, they’re often built for general purpose and even if they do, some models will just end up getting screwed over still.
Just looking at your model and making assumptions that for 1.4k triangles you have beveled the edges of the holes for the pins at the other end.
Doing a quick calculation by making the holes in the far flange without bevels you might be able to get it down to about 1162 tris. I’m just assuming 10 tris for the flat faces of the ‘holed’ flange that are facing and facing away from the camera .
If that’s so and you have 500 of these pipes in your game that could be a total savings of 119,000 triangles.
That depends on how many you will put. If you are going to put a lot of them, i would suggest remaking or optimizing the mesh.
this is amazing, keep on improving and improving!
Seeing how the bevels are rather small, you can actually use normal maps instead of bevels. They still give the illusion of bevels but your model will have a lot less triangles.
Thank you all to who responded! my pc decided to die and all of the parts were fried the same night i posted this and had to build a new one… yeah. But anywho its all back together and we are good! : )
