tbh, not much, some claim poly has more tools (I guess it does...) but the majority of the tools I use edit mesh has anyway. Personally I think Edit Mesh works better because it works with Triangles, and halo goes by triangles. When your in editable poly all you can select are faces really, you don't see triangles unless you physically make you faces into triangles. Not to mention poly doesn't let you see divided triangles that are inside faces, even when there not co-planar with the rest of the face, so you can't see any triangulation from the face, it doesn't even show up when you render a editable poly model in max. The only edges you see are the ones you can see when you have view edges turned on, but it still neglects to show you the actual triangles.
In Mesh mode, you see everything including the non-coplanar triangles, which is the way the model is going to look in halo anyway.
Of course nowadays with the new engines that go by face count and have really good face smoothing it doesn't really matter too much when it comes to the triangles.
I just think triangles are a lot better, they show what the mesh is really made out of. What I never understood is why editable mesh lists faces and triangles both as faces, they should make the triangle selection mode be called "Triangles" not faces.... doesn't really make sense.
Thats just my understanding of it anyway. Me and snafubar were sort of debating it recently when I was trying to compile an alpha build of one of his bsps. I was complaining about his triangulation because he modeled everything using edit poly and some of his triangulation was causing pointless errors.
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