how to eliminate polls

i was wondering, how would some one go about geting rid of polls from a mesh???

The only closed object that has no poles is a torus. Planes and tubes can also be without poles. So in practise you will almost always have some poles to deal with. The best you can do is move them to areas where they will cause the fewest problems – ie hidden under hair or flatter areas that won’t be stretched much during animation and in natural creases.

GreyBeard

In general I don’t find poles (vertices with 5 joining edges rather than 4) a major problem. Most/all of the head models I’ve seen have a pole somewhere around the cheek as the eye loop intersects with the mouth/nose loop. This seems to work okay for most models. They could be an issue in major deform areas (nearer the mouth, for example).

Poles are best avoided, I believe, because they make it harder to work the mesh (edge loops don’t travel sensibly past poles). Triangles are a different matter as they can mess up the subsurf (and affect edge loop flow).

Even triangular quads (polys that look like triangles with 4 verts) can cause some issues as they can crease the mesh. They are useful for increasing/decreasing the edge count between adjoining areas (like from low-poly arm to high-poly hand) and of course for making creases in the mesh but it’s important to position them carefully to avoid ugly creases in smooth regions. Luckily, such polys can usually be “chased” through the mesh until they end up out of sight or somewhere a crease might be acceptable or useful.