Hey. I noticed that older games like Final Fantasy 7 didnt make much use of textures in their models. For example the only textures usualy found in the character models would be the eyes/mouth and maybe a tatoo or an logo on clothing. The rest would all just be coloured polygons. Now as far as ive seen modern game models dont seem to have any untextured polygons at all (i might just be missing it though). i mean some model might have some solidly coloured area yet it would stil be covered by an texture. Is there a reason for this? i thought it might be to save rendering time by not having to enable and disable texturing or it might make it easier to modify the model but thats just me guessing. Not that it bothers me im just being curious :D

Texture mapping used to be expensive -- filling solid polys was much cheaper.

Nowadays, texturing is (basically) almost free. And yes, faffing about enabling/disabling textures is a pain. So the artists just texture all the surfaces.

In addition, freeing the surface colours like this means that you can use the vertex colours for other things -- baked lighting perhaps or dynamic bloodying/dirtying.

Thnx!

Also texturing surfaces can be used to make them look more smooth/round. If your polygon edges are too visible you could edit the texture so everywhere an edge is, the texture color is a bit darker or less intense. Or if the surface is supposed to be fuzzy, you could add Gaussian noise to soften your solid color.

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Original post by Katie Texture mapping used to be expensive -- filling solid polys was much cheaper. Nowadays, texturing is (basically) almost free. And yes, faffing about enabling/disabling textures is a pain. So the artists just texture all the surfaces. In addition, freeing the surface colours like this means that you can use the vertex colours for other things -- baked lighting perhaps or dynamic bloodying/dirtying.

Actually texture mapping isn't free, as a matter of fact lots of times with the newer game engines the texture sheets actually take more of a toll than higher poly counts.

Nowadays you will find that models won't generally have any parts of it that are just a basic plain color.

Lots of other times it's because different map types shader the same uv coordinance. So while the diffuse map might seem plain, the normal map won't be so that the game model will look smoother.

"Actually texture mapping isn't free"

OK, this is true, but I wasn't really going to start talking about fill-rate limits vs geometry limits in an answer to a fairly basic question about why no-one uses plain polys anymore. Compared to the aggravation of texture mapping on the CPU where one would typically use flat colours whenever possible, using the GPU makes it look basically free.