I have been snooping around sketchfab looking at your topology and I must say...
Do you all have shares in 3d cards? Because you are punishing peoples computers for no good reason.
Damn there is some amazing things here- but y'all can get this stuff in from between a third to a tenth of the overhead.
Here are some of your top sins!
Sin 1: Not looking under your model before you publish. Sure, it's the base, but it drives up your count and people can judge you on that.
(reproduction of what I have seen)
Sin 2: Subdividing flat hard surfaces.
What do them there edges even do, y'all?
Top: Naughty
Bottom: Nice
Sin 3: Teeny thin bevels on a baked model
You gotta decide who is giving you normals- your model, or your normal map. If your model looks like this, AND you have a normal map, your kinda doing double duty.
Sin 4: Seriously... I mean... seriously.
Sin 5: Weird budgeting priorities
Your character has boxes for shoulders but their brooch is extremely detailed.
Padme: those sleeves come off, right?
Annakin: *dead eyed grin*
Doing this means painting weights wont prematurely age you and overdraw doesn't bite you.
Sin 6: Floating geo details
Great in theory- but when you LOD, these aren't in the texture of the mesh below, so either crunch badly or disappear.
This pretty much could have been a normal map.
Sin 7: Just because a cylinder needs 32 edges to look round at it's widest part, doesn't mean you need to keep 32 edges at it's smallest. Gun barrels often have duffer amounts of geo inside because of this.
Sin 8: Your cell shade shell doesn't need to be the same as your mesh. You don't have to include internal stuff you will never see.
Actually you can use this for styling your line weight too
Take a glance inside your characters mouth. The underside of tongues and the back are usually like this.
So for sin 9: get into that gob and clean up.
No naming names, but this is a back pack on one (absolutely gorgeous) model.
Pupil on the same character.
Underside of boot.
It isn't all bad news- take a look at the topology that Antonbelyaev lays down on this stylised cart.
Perfect.
Sin 9: Loops to hell.
welp, if you just realised you had to rush off and fix something- do consider throwing money at my head.
Optimisation isn't just for games- though we have the most extreme cases. Well optimises models and shader/texture combos help all the way along the pipeline for film and TV too.
Skinning, uv mapping and animation all go by much more quickly and smoothly if you have good topo and fast materials.
Being able to email files, quickly archive projects and send assets to an offsite render farm are all a plus.
The smaller the memory footprint of your scenes, the less likely you are to crash during a render.
And optimisation goes beyond cleanup- it also means baking all your bones, blend shapes, muscle, hair, cloth and physics sims to a point cloud for rendering, and lighting tricks.
Okay #gameart folks, I was donated these two tweezers from a VR project to demonstrate some cleanup and good topo.
Big thanks to the contributor, who gets the model back cleaned up as a thanks. :)
Are ya ready for this?
Okay, so here is the topology, and, as you can see, this is far from ideal. Both artists here are from film, so they are just learning the ropes for games- and again, they donated these so give your thanks
Okay, so lets start with the brief. These are for VR.
Now VR means you can get the tool very, very close to your face. It also means normal maps are not going to create much of an illusion of detail.
#Gamedevtip
Add 'tutorial videos' as a daily food group. I consume anywhere between 3 to 20 tutorial videos a day, often saving and going back over them quickly to lock things in.
Taking time out of your day to learn stuff from other disciplines is a great idea, as it allows you to build a common language with other members, and give insights into the challenges they face.
As a game developer you must work the learning muscles constantly, because everything is changing, and new techniques and tools appear every day.
Taking time to learn them means a huge time savings down the track. It isn't wasted time.