or just in subsurf modelling? I’ve been working with Wings a bit, and I noticed that five of the primitives are made of or at least have triangles in them. Does that mean they’re useless, or just not good for subdivision surface modelling?
Quads are definately the way to go with surface modeling. My experience has been that working with triangles is a bit hit and miss. Sometimes it looks OK, sometimes you wish you hadn’t done it.
I only allow a triangle when I don’t wnat to subdivide an edge to make it a quad, that’s pretty rare. It’s best to plan on making quads from the beginning, it’s better than cleaning up triangles later.
Have fun
Brian J
Ditto to what was said above. However, if you are not planning on animating it, then a few tris here and ther will not kill your scene.
Quads are better though.
BgDM
The only advantage of tris is that the vertex are always coplanar so the faces are exactly on a plane, always.
Martin
In my experince in low poly game creation, tri’s are the way to go sepcially when your models need to have very few poly count. Usually we make all faces tris even at the 1500+ poly limmit. The rational behind this is that you have more control over every face of the model. A quad is basically 2 tris that can have 2 possible configurations, at least that is how most game engines see them, therefore leting the computer decide on how tris are configured is not the best choice in low polys. Also, tris play a major part when rigging and animation is involved, you’d want every face to be controlled to avoid unpredictabilities from the start.
If you are doing CAD work or stills that uses low poly, the above mentioned wont really matter much.
High poly is a diffrent matter. Use quads if you like your faces smooth, which will most likely be the case for most sub-d’s. But tri’s does have it’s uses in sub division surfaces, such as intended crummpled, wrinkled, or irregular surfaces.
So the primitives made of triangles are useful for low poly modelling but should be avoided for animations?