Why you should triangulate your game assets (Blender)

In this video, I'll discuss why you MUST triangulate your game assets to avoid issues in other software.

[Bodni]

quick tip, use the triangulate after the weighted normal, and check the "keep normals" button

[MrGooGone]

Another interesting note is, even though in some cases it might look like it works fine with Ngons in something like Substance, when you bake the textures and import them into Blender, you might notice weird warping of the texture even though the model looks the same. This is because textures are displayed a bit differently depending on how it's triangulated.

[clocknite]

If you're just exporting your mesh you used boolean a ton, without thinking of topology after, you'll have a bad time no matter what game engine. So this is just bad practice game dev modeling.


Assuming good topology practices are used, you triangulate because if you use normal maps, the triangle direction is important.
if you bake quads in marmoset and it reads triangulation one way, but Unreal/Unity reads it another way, it could mess up the shading at that area.

[triggvfx]

thankyou so much i have had marmoset toolbag for 2 weeks now and i had no idea what the issue was but with this video i finally fixed it thankyou!

[xen]

Oh my god, i saw your model on the Blender group. Now i find out i was already subscribed to you lmao.

[yusrighouse]

When you mentioned they use face weighted normals method in Star Citizen I went looking. They really do! They also do a whole lot of other interesting stuff to optimize. Cool stuff.

[furynotes]

Okay. If you have quads. Then your good. But if you have n gon workflow. As in more than 4 sides. Then you have Triangulate. Otherwise game engines will triangulate for you. Then you have a very high risk of getting a mess up mesh when importing to that game engine. I think I have it right.

[DrDreadful]

Oh my gosh thank you so much I couldn't figure out this issue.

[Dezhavu]

Okay, what I heard was: Use quads and good topology if you don't want issues.

[jasonmcdade]

Thanks great tip! Now I understand the differences.

[teainastorm]

Brilliant! Thank you very much Josh ...

[redhorsereincarnated]

Is it bad to have a lot of lines coming from a vertex? I heard that somewhere? This happens when I triangulate in Blender. I have to go back over my whole model and redo a lot of the tris. It's almost easier to do them all manually.

As a simple example. Say I have a square face that is divided into four equal squares. Blender will triangulate with all lines meeting in the center vertex or some random combination instead of, for example, all lines from top left to bottom right.

[muhaY-vbvp]

The same thing when export DAE to sketchup, its better when its triangulated rather than quads. Tris making UV works in sketchup

[odgreenshq]

does this also happen when you export as an STL. file ??? if so this could possibly help too

[Atezian]

Doesnt blender have a export option checkbox for triangulation that is by default on?

[HypoPineal]

Thx for the video,
I have the impression that the triangulate modifier does not give a good result when two or more similar UVs are tacked on each other, if anyone has a solution? Thank you all

[TheKevphil]

When you import a CAD model, or SketchUp model as a saved DAE, it will already be triangulated. So if you're not making any changes, is that model already fit for texturing?

[neilliu]

A very important question - Should I use triangulation before or after weight normal?

[Crazystunts]

Do you need to apply the triangulation modifier?

[JoaoVictor-vdfn]

Does the triangulate modifier messes with your UVs ?