Daniel Görner Wrote:A noob question: How much triangles are too much? I'm half way through the pattern and have almost 500 triangles.
Daniel,
tha's not a noob question, but it depends on the pattern. There are simple patterns with less triangles/quads (like 973p09), and complex patterns with a lot more, e.g file 973pq1 is a double sided torso with 488 triangles and 2069 quads (which make whole of 4626 triangles).
What you can do is to design the bigger details (= clearly visible at normal zoom level) with more triangles/quads than smaller ones, to smooth curves for example. But that is also a point of taste, because if you do a pattern of 5000 lines, you wouldn't care about saving 20 or 50 lines, eh? Just find your best way between details and filesize, if you make a bigger one, you can "optimize" and downsize it later. If you computed your pattern (means import from bmp or bmp2dat), the size is usually very huge. That is another reason (exept from having fun ;-) ) for doing it by hand.