[3d Max] Can you please provide a guideline for proper modeling?

After some testing with your fancy engine I now want to go on and built a more complex scene on my own.
Can you give some hints which modeling technique goes best with the engine?

For example the max. vertices count for a single object and overall? (what are the counts in the bunker demo?)
Is there a limit for objects? Better split into many simple objects or keep more complex geometry?

Do you suggest to use triangulated geometry or does that have no influence? (I'd prefer to use quad modeled geometry for better smoothing results).

Long speech, short: How to get best performance? Any hints on workflow? (-> Camera flight, not moving objects)

p.s.: For now I would say this your engine is much faster than e.g. papervision is! Keep it free for non commercial use..and implement the stuff from road map asap

The best way to get best performance is dynamically changed quality of textures and scene. When cam is moving, set precision of all texturematerials on scene to "low", and stageQuality prop to "low". When cam stops turn back high quality of stage and textures.

Joachim Knecht wrote:For example the max. vertices count for a single object and overall? (what are the counts in the bunker demo?)
Is there a limit for objects? Better split into many simple objects or keep more complex geometry?

Use standard low-poly technics.
For better perfomance we recommend to use no more than 3000 polygons overall.

Joachim Knecht wrote:Do you suggest to use triangulated geometry or does that have no influence? (I'd prefer to use quad modeled geometry for better smoothing results).

3DS Max works with triangles, even if you see quads.
To convert triangles to polygons (e.g. quads) you should run MeshUtils.autoWeldVertices & MeshUtils.autoWeldFaces methods.

Speaking of the Bunker demo.
The optimization reduced vertices number from 4473 to 1104 and faces number from 1804 to 921.

How do you find out how many polygons and faces are currently being displayed on the screen? I did notice that some polygons/faces hide, or disappear, if they are not needed to be shown. Ie, the other four/three sides of a cube will be missing there sides (a very smart idea, great job on accomplishing btw).

What Class do I look at to count my polys or faces?

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 20/06/2008 06:55:19

In future we plan to collect render statistics via FPS utility.
But right now you can do it with a little trick.

"3DS Max works with triangles, even if you see quads. "
Oh this was new to me, but you're right!

Thanks for tips - I'll start right now