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Battle
04-08-2005, 12:54 PM
I’ve learned that when you model you should strive to have quad polygon. Especially for Organic modeling and not sure for Non-Organic. I don’t have much experience in modeling to know when/not to use Triangle or N-gone. Please help me I’m very confused.

Organic:
Topology is very important because you will be deforming the model. All model regardless if it’s organic or not will be broken down into triangle (the atom of all models). So why do people model in quad (I think I know the answer but I wanted to ask anyway :) ) ? Why not in Triangle?

Is it OK to mix both? Like a lot of quad on the model and some Tria? HOW about I go ahead and model everything in Triangle?

Non-Organic:
Is it true that for non-organic objects like a Table topology is not important because you won’t be deforming it? Does that mean I can leave some face N-gone and not worry about turning it into Triangles? What if I decided to deform the table do I have to go back and fix the topology then?

Also, what MUST I know about Topology when comes to rendering it??
smaug
04-09-2005, 04:19 PM
the quad thing comes from subd modeling.. when a model subdivided every vertex has a strenght to pull the newly created vertices towards itself.. when you model in quads you can be sure that the strenght between vertices will be shared equally giving you nice smooth subd's.. if you use ngons; lets say a pentagon, the fifth vertex will pull the subd towards itselt creating unwanted bumps or something... that is actually why everyone trying to keep it all in quads..
it is also important for rendering because in most applications shading is calculated according to the interpolation of the vertices.. so those vertices can change your shading especially in low poly modeling..
as a rule just keep your models as clean as possible..
gonemad
04-13-2005, 03:40 AM
Quads are also usually sought afer for orgainic modeling for animation reasons. Non-quads can (in some cases not all) lead to weird pinching or artifacts on the surface of the render.

As far as modeling things which are not orgainic personally I don't worry about how many sides my polygons have as long as It looks good in the render.

For either organic or inorganic, I think the output is what should determin that for you. If it looks good in the render, if it animates well if it has too, and if it falls within our polycount budget for the project then who cares if they're quads or not.
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04-13-2005, 03:40 AM
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