Originally posted by TopAce
What do I lost if I don't triangulate a model? Why is it necessary at all?
Okay.
There are three big problems in modding that can cause a model to have bad moving textures/holes in the side of the ship.
1) Non-flat faces. Any face which is curved in any way will display oddly in FS2
2) Connectable Polygon Vertices - You must be able to draw a line between a vertex and every other vertex in the shape without leaving the boundries of the shape.
3) Vertices in a line. You can not have 3 Vertices in a line.
(look at
this page of IP Andrews ship Creation guide for pictures if you didn't get what I mean).
A triangle can not ever suffer from any of those problems. It also can't have more three vertices so it will never suffer from the 20+ verts problem that means it won't convert in PCS.
For this reason some people triangulate their models to avoid all these problems. However triangulating turns ALL the polys into triangles which drastically increases the poly count of your ship. It can also triangulate faces differently on each side of the model resulting a ship that is no longer symetrical.
For this reason it's better to fix problem faces using the Polygon Draw tool in TS.
If you're using 3DS MAX I believe the whole thing is moot anyway cause I believe that max automatically triangulates anyway.
