Or, if you really want to make your scenery to take as low resources as possible you can build it using only 12 triangles. Taking into consideration those facts I think, we can still model this umbrella with quite nice level of detail using only 20 triangles (left image). Yes sure, most players will go to explore this beautiful scenery with helicopters, cars or UFO, but after a while most of them will perform “only” takeoffs and landings. That’s quite a lot for an object that is 2 meters high and the average pilot will fly over at between 80 - 140 knots at over 100ft. This tells us that there are 136 faces in the image. Have a look at the number underlined in red in the image above. Here you can see them without a texture or paint applied I’m sure you will agree that they look to all intents and purpose as they are designed to look you can see just from the picture the face count is bound to be different, but lets look a bit closer at them. Each of these is different in face count numbers, the one on the right having the most and the one to the far left the least.
This short article is designed to show you, the prospective modeller some very good tips when creating models for use within FlightGear or any other situation which is dependant on face count.