Cubik Studio

Hi everyone,

What is everyones thoughts on the best number of elements for models.

Clearly, this is a "how long is a piece of string question", but still ... How long is your string?

As I understand it, Minecraft draws models by each element. Culling faces and simple textures are some of the ways to optimise a model, but I would still like to know, what number of elements in different models seem practical to you?

Things like logs would be a nightmare if they had too many elements, there are just so many of them in any one scene! However, a sword might be a more realistic model to increase the number of elements on, as there maybe only a handful being rendered at any one time.

Has anyone got any numbers, knowledge, or experience on this topic? If so, show us your string!

Thanks for the comments!

What is important is not really the number of elements but number of triangles.

One element has by default 6 polygons = 12 triangles

Modern games has ton of polygons so Minecraft models should not worry that much about number of them, except if that model is used a lot of time (like grass blocks, dirt, logs, leaves, ...) because Minecraft doesn't have any LOD system (level of details) and would just render ALL the triangles, even if the block is super far from camera.

So for an item, you can go quite crazy with number of triangles. For blocks, just be careful how often the block is rendered on screen most of the time.

Also, always be sure to optimize you model by deleting/hiding faces. And when not possible - for a block - be sure to use the culling options. Cubik has automatic functions for both but none is perfect.

In Cubik Studio if you do voxel models and worry about number of triangles, use the 3rd method to convert voxels to elements. It will create a big texture but a lot less elements.
If you don't worry about number of triangles but more about texture size, use the 2nd method.
If you want to assign one texture per voxel, then use 1st method.