Hello! I am a beginner when it comes to unreal and blender and everything when it comes to it, and I was just wandering about the vertice count…
I have made this model of the mesoamerican temples, which, according to blender has about 5k vertices and 10k triangles.
To do smoothing, UE4 will split the mesh along smoothing angles to separate smoothing. For example, if you have a cube, normally it would have 8 vertices, but when you import it to UE4 it will have 32
Thank you, and one more thing; for future reference, if I want a model to have them all smoothed together, how do I do that?
And thank you for the rapid response!
I’m not sure how you would do it in Blender, there’s some smoothing options when you import to UE4–that can apply an automatic smoothing or use the settings in the file. In 3ds Max it’s very easy where you just select all the polygons and set them to the same smoothing group.
Actually, it’s not just the smoothing. Due to the way GPUs work, a vertex in a buffer can only be shared between multiple triangles if all of that vertex’ attributes (position, normal, color, UV coordinates) are identical. If any of those is different across the triangles that share the vertex (normals in a flat-shaded cube, for example), a new vertex has to be created to store the different values (same position, different normals).
So, it’s Blender that is “under counting” the number of vertices, when it comes to GPU workload.
Well, for things like buildings it’s pretty much impossible to use much less than 3x the vertices. It’s normal, don’t fret about it. Organic models like characters or rounded continuous surfaces are pretty much the only situation where you have some vertex reuse.