Quality Control & Assurance Flashcards

What does 'watertight' mean in the context of 3D mesh quality?

Answer: The mesh has no holes, open edges, or non-manifold geometry

A watertight mesh is fully closed with no gaps, making it suitable for 3D printing and simulation.

Which tool in most 3D software helps identify faces with zero area or zero-length edges?

Answer: Mesh Cleanup / Clean Up Geometry

Mesh cleanup tools automatically detect and remove degenerate geometry like zero-area faces and zero-length edges.

What is the purpose of checking 'face normals' during QA of a 3D model?

Answer: To ensure all faces point in the correct direction for proper shading and rendering

Flipped normals cause surfaces to appear invisible or incorrectly shaded in renders and game engines.

A client reports that a character model looks fine in the viewport but has dark artifacts in renders. What is the most likely cause?

Answer: Smoothing group or normal map conflicts

Smoothing group errors or baked normal map misalignment commonly produce dark render artifacts not visible in real-time viewports.

What does 'scale not applied' on an object typically cause in a game engine?

Answer: Physics, lighting, and collision calculations behaving unexpectedly

Non-applied transforms confuse engine calculations that rely on world-space dimensions being baked into the mesh.

Which polygon count metric is most relevant when evaluating a model for a mobile game?

Answer: Triangle count as rendered by the GPU

GPUs render triangles, and mobile hardware has strict triangle budgets, making tri count the critical metric.

What is a 'T-junction' artifact in mesh QA, and why is it problematic?

Answer: A vertex on an edge that is not shared by adjacent polygons, causing rendering cracks

T-junctions leave gaps between polygons because the vertex is not connected to the neighboring face, causing visible cracks at render time.