Higher polycount in Show tool than in Milkshape

#1 You are using doubled sided surfaces, perhaps?

#2 I was wondering that. But from what I've read in these forums, that isn't possible in Milkshape.

#3 What happens when you run the "clean" or "model cleaner" commands from the tools menu, any change?

#4 Clean doesn't do anything. Model cleaner asks me if I want to weld verticies that will cause texture discontinuities. Whether I do or not, the triangle count remains unaffected in both Milkshape and Torque.

Thanks for the suggestions, keep them coming if you've got them, I appreciate it.

#5 Hey Vijay, I've never been able to keep the same polycount in the detail control of the showtool identical to the mesh prior to export, and I use Max so you can rule out this being a milkshape exclusive problem. Even with using singlesided materials on meshes made entirely of tris.

I kinda always assumed that the showtool control window was including all the faces of every object included in the .dts file whether they are rendered or not in engine as polygons, cause they still need to be there. Things like all the nodes, bounds, detail markers, dummies, etc. each of those would add 12 polygons (triangles from 6-sided boxes). I could never prove it but that was my only conclusion.

Why don't you post the actual polycount of the object in question to compare the before (milkshape) and after (showtool) numbers and see if anyone can start to make sense of this phenomenon.

edit: for grammar, I need to go back to skool.

#6 I've had similar issues. And I believe you're correct, Jordan. The bone objects get exported and counted in the polycount. Although I don't see why this would double your tri-count...should only add a couple tris for each bone. The only way I think you can avoid this is by collapsing or deleting faces from your bone objects, or by using nulls/locators/whatever milkshape has (sorry, never used it before) as your bones...

Another possibility is that while you don't have a setting for double-sided materials in milkshape, that double sided materials is the default for the exporter...

Jeff

#7 That's an interesting theory, and it might be contributing to the problem. But I just tried exporting a simple sphere, with nothing else in the scene. Pre-export, it's 120 tris. Post export, it's 260. Anyone should be able to replicate this using Milkshape and exporter.

Here's another funny thing. I just tried the same thing with the old exporter that ships with Torque, and now post-export I get a count of over 700 polygons in -show!

I'm hoping this is just something funky in the way the torque engine is coming up with this number. I checked out the dump.dmp file that the exporter creates, and it looks like it knows what it's doing:

...
Optimizing meshes...

Optimizing mesh "Sphere" detail level 1.
89 verts before joining verts
89 verts after joining verts
120 faces before stripping
Using Quick, dirty, & ugly stripping method.
27 strips with average length 7.44 (range 3 to 20) and 27 reversals
...

#8 Greetings!

Are these objects tri-stripped? I've heard from another artist that the triangle calculation in TGE may not be accurate with triangle strips.

Perhaps try to export again with triangle stripping disabled and see what count the tool reports.

- LightWave Dave

#9 Hi David,

That makes sense. I just ran the show tool again with the bool TSMesh::smUseOneStrip setting set to false (i usually have it on true), and that changed the tri count again (much closer to what it should be).

So I'm basically going to happily ignore what the show tool says. :)

Thanks all for the help,
Vijay