Is this bad practice

Suppose the upper part of the cube needed to be split for detail, but the bottom half would be fine being one flat face. Is it bad practice to minimize the amount of poly’s but not have a continuous loops around the cube like in the left picture, or must it be continuous like in the right picture?


If you are not using subsurf it is fine. If you are subsurfing you would probably need to use the method of your second picture.

Minimising the number of verts or faces is necessary for making game props but otherwise it is a lot of work for nothing: modern computers and Blender should handle millions of verts easily.

Cheers for the reply.
Subsurfing or smoothing I presume?
Well the aim eventually is to produce some form of game so I’m trying to stick to low poly modeling for now.
The only way to get around this as far as I can tell in blender is to use triangles, but I’ve heard this is unacceptable, i.e does it cause too many problems for animation/deformation etc.? Or will just a few triangles be fine? I’ve looking at a few tutorials and maya seems to have a ‘split poly’ tool which blender doesn’t seem to have which is a tad annoying, but if triangles can get around this problem then I’m not too bothered. Thanks for your time

In Blender you can split a poly into triangles with CTRL-T or do the reverse with ALT-J.

I am told 2.5 will permit polys with 5 or more verts but 2.49 won’t, and I don’t recommend using 2.5 yet.
i think outside Game Engines generally use shapes made only of tri’s like 3DS files - the trouble with triangles comes in modelling when you want to smooth shapes with Subsurf or use some of the other modifiers.

Avoid triangles as much as you can, although a few triangles won’t hurt, but depending on where you place them. For example y made a character with almost no triangles, except in the hands. The fingers need more edge loops to provide a better form, but the arms don’t have so many. I’ve seen a way on a tutorial to use the knife tool to avoid them, but I thought it was complicating things for nothing. So far with subsurf those 4 or 5 triangles don’t cause any harm.

Here is different way. If you split the top 3 x 3, you can have nice loops made out of quads.

http://i1135.photobucket.com/albums/m626/cabby24/Blender%20Pics%202010/9_to_1.png

bare in mind that most game engines will only accept triangles… that’s not to say that you should model in tris, as the engine will convert them for you, but you don’t need to bend over backward to avoid them (when making a game)

Brachi, it’s funny you should say that because the exact reason why I was asking was because I was have difficulty with fingers.
Ridix, that’s very neat, I never would have thought of it that way so thankyou very much
Highlander, aye, that’s seems like good advice. I would like to stick to quads as much as possible to make editing easier. Hopefully I’ll only have to use tris at the very last stage.
Thank you all again!