editable mesh or editable poly?

[watersage]

I’ve recently begun working through the tutorials in several books ( Ted Boardman’s and some others) and still I don’t find any good examples or explanations of why to choose either editable mesh or editable poly to work with.

 

What are some practical reasons to use use each? Many thanks.

[Karl Larsen]

I was just wondering the same thing, though it seems that no one has had an opinion on this for quite a few years!

[Dave Buckley]

editable poly if you want edit at sub-object level, editable mesh if you've finished with the model and want to free up some memory.

 

sometimes you don't get a choice especially when importing models from other programs, .skp files always result in an editable mesh for example. And simply converting them to poly will result in a mesh that needs a bit of cleaning.

 

at the end of the day it depends what you need to do

[Peter M. Gruhn]

My own dodgy experience...

 

Poly has better new tools, use it. Even more so now with the ... new stuff that used to be Polyboost.

 

I used to go back to mesh for a couple things before I figured out how to do them with Poly.

 

- Display normals. But there's xview which will show backfaces in bright green among other cool things. It's less furry looking but still quite handy.

 

- Edge visibility. But then I figured out how to "delete" edges I didn't want and I use the Soulburn script which can select edges based on angle...

 

So I don't think I know anymore what Mesh is for anymore.

[erickdt]

I agree with Peter. In my somewhat limited experience (modelling inside MAX) edit poly is far easier to work with. There are alot of built in tools in edit poly that just aren't available in edit mesh.

 

I do however often use edit mesh to assign multi materials to objects by selecting elements and applying different materials to them. It might not be the "cleanest" way of making multi materials (in terms of managing material names) but it's worked for me for years. For whatever reason edit mesh seems to work better for this than edit poly...

 

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