Rendering question: face count vs. triangle count...

[Anonymous]

While modeling an object, does the face count have any impact on rendering?

The first picture shows the model with the higer face count.

Now this picture shows the model with the reduced face count, but the triangle count is the same.

I wouldn't think that it would make any difference because when the model gets tesselated for rendering, but I'm not 100% sure.

Also is there any difference between say the Maya software renderer and Mental Ray.

Any thoughts or comments would be helpful.

Thank you.

[damaggio]

I believe it does not, like you said at time of rendering it will be tessellated anyhow, however, to keep the scene light for viewport manipulation, quads will definitely give a faster interaction specially when having tons of geometry .
I usually use the quadrangulate tool in maya to clean models from the Internet that come triangulated.
Also, no one would like to uv a triangulated mesh, it gets very messy in the uv editor.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply damaggio.

I agree with you about the UV issue, that gets to be a Hag with all those triangles.