Vert Lies

I’ve been reading into more of the technical side to vert counts and it’s actually incredibly interesting and obviously useful to know. As far as I understand when unwrapping a model, that when you create a uv split, or island, the vert that rests upon the seam actually doubles. When you click one vert on the seam in the uv editor, the corresponding vert will also be highlighted. Two vertices, not one. Max and maya don’t inform you of the “true” vert count. This is known as a uv discontinuity, which is why less seams is more as it’s less of an effort for the engine to render.

The engine also views the faces of a surface as sharing the same material properties which mean that vertex splits would occur when a different material is on the surface.

Also worth a note is that a model can be split up depending on smoothing groups as engines don’t allow verts to share a polygon with different uv coordinates. This is why it’s important to properly unwrap your model when dealing with hard surface models, as the normals can be messed up due to this, as far as I’m aware.

So if in max if your fine ass model of a box has a tri count of 8 but each face has its own uv island instead of being one; then technically you actually have a higher tri count in engine.
Interesting stuff!