Long thin triangles

Development World Creation
1

Hello,

TRI-S.blend (1.1 MB)

  1. I came across an article that suggested not using long, thin triangles, but I have a lot of furniture…doors+frames, windows+frames, skirting boards, etc. Some of the things are 3+ meters (10 feet) long and everything has 4X bevels…it just looks ugly without them. The goal is to make a miniature game for UE5. Where or should I add support loops?

  2. I also have a question about triangulation. I added a Blender file with a door frame and two identical doors…the one on the left is TRIANGLE-based and the other QUAD-based (with some tri-s). Which one should I use? Are triangle-based ones “okay”?..if they are flat and just triangulate all the way or should I still choose quad-based and auto-triangulate it? The goal is still to save vertices where possible, but all these articles that suggest avoiding triangles, etc. have raised these questions.

2

Long thin tris are not ideal with traditional geometry or nanite, with normal geo it causes more quad overdraw and with nanite it makes it harder for the mesh to create and use triangle clusters effectively.

But also long thin tris are somewhat inevitable. What I do is deliberately terminate triangles as soon as possible (if you have a hole in a plane, don’t have the tris go all the way to the corners of the plane, but have a square that it terminates to just around the hole). And add more edge loops so the long tris aren’t quite as long, sometimes it’s a split every 30 cm.

3

Thanks for the reply. It looks like I need to add 2 support loops for the windows (inside the door) and 7 for the frame (vertically). More opinions are welcome.

4

You avoid long tris on transparencies and stuff that causes overdraw.
On manifold shapes like a window they hardly matter.

The problem is how the tris are rendered and the time the renderer has to spend dealing with tris that cut across a ton of pixels.
Probably not even worth worrying about this in 2025, since its not like the engine does anything “best practice” anymore.