Max and TriStrips

[Anonymous]

Hi all,

Using Max 9, is there any modifiers, or exporters which will allow me to "stripify" or "tristrip" geometry?

B.

[Anonymous]

Maybe, what does "tristrip" mean?

[Anonymous]

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the link to OSG.

Trying to export to Ogre’s .mesh format.

[Anonymous]

Blender has tools you can download for ogre so maybe you could try import Max into blender to then export in the format you require (if blender does the stripify in the export) : if not you could try edit the export script in python so it does.

….Ignore above just asked someone in the know, word is "Ogre meshviewer" program/utility can convert a mesh into tristrip format. Use the normal .mesh export from 3dsmax and then run the utility.
http://downloads.sourceforge.net/ogre/OgreMeshViewer-1.0.1.zip?modtime=1113175222&big_mirror=1

[Anonymous]

Hi David,

Many thanks for the link to that Ogre App. It works great.

My next question, is if you (or anyone else here) has some rough modeling guidelines for creating "Tri-Strip" friendly meshes (in Max preferably).

After speaking with a colleague in industry, he told me that its something studios like to see technical artists ship with. Apparently the latest Madden game characters are composed entirely of one tristrip, and that the trees in any of the Spyro games are all one tristrip, which makes instancing them have little cost.

I’m chewing through some RenderWare docs at the moment, and they’ve got some material on the subject, but if anyone has got anything handy, I’d appreciate the help.

Many thanks,
B

[Anonymous]

i have never heard of "tri-strips"! is this something i am missing out on? :shock: its not like i have not been using games engines for a short while or am green in the 3d front. are they really worth investigating?

[Anonymous]

I haven’t heard of any scripts or plugins for this, maybe some of the poly modelling tools like Polyboost’s retopology tools could help?

[Anonymous]

Hi jediboy,
I normally just put my trust in the exporter I am using at the time to do the work for complex meshes as I would think with even with the best planned modeling techniques you are going to need redundant / non rendered polys to connect strips for models that don’t "unravel" easily (like a Player in Madden so I think think your colleague should have mentioned the extra polys needed to make a single tristrip in complex cases).

That said a knowledge of how the particular algorithm works would help of course but you would need to read the many papers on the subject (ACM Siggraph) and find out which one or combination your exporter uses. I have not gone that in depth so the only advice I have is to make sure the normals on your polygon surface all face out (or in) so the tri winding does not effect stripping : standard practice already.

As I say a well written exporter should do its best to make the fewest strips or fans it can and then have the ability to automatically connect them with a few extra polys if you want a single strip.

i have never heard of "tri-strips"! is this something i am missing out on?[/quote:f57f1bb263]
I am quite new to the concept too but I intend to take advantage of it at a hardware level when working on some xbox xna stuff soon (Just started learning the architecture today). Tristrips are not just about making the file size required to store a model smaller but actually rendering performance increases on the gpu’s because your pushing around less vertices and can process models in fewer cycles.

[Anonymous]

Historically this mattered more on the PS2 (maybe it’s become more important again on the PS3 maybe), personally I never had this as a request on pc/xbox, although it couldn’t hurt to have. I’m not sure how exactly an artist is supposed to enforce this without tools so I wouldn’t worry about it too much. Your artistic skills will probably matter more at an interview stage.

If you DO want to reduce on splits in your mesh remember uv cordinate boundaries, sub-materials and seperated normals (as done by smoothing groups and splitting normals) will split the final mesh too.

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