OK, I can see the benefit of using the new bmesh tools and ngons to model quicker… where everything is completely falling apart for me is in 1 big area…
Once you have the completed model … removing the ngons. The more I try to “repair” the topology… I continue to ADD more ngons and make things worse for myself. I’m using a addon called mesh lint which points out the ngons. But it clearly shows me I am taking a completely wrong approach to removing the ngons.
Are there any tutorials out there that really focus on a proper workflow for repairing your topology in a logical way to remove ngons prior to rendering?
The easy/simpler way is just to go in Edit Mode, unselect your model and click on Select -> By Number of Verts , then in the operator (or press F6 to make it popup) set the settings to “Greater Than” and 4
It will select all your ngons, then from them you press CTRL+F -> Triangulate Faces (or click on Mesh -> Faces -> Triangulate Faces)
No more n-gons
From there you can try a CTRL+F -> Tris to Quads (or click on Mesh -> Faces -> Tris to Quads) to make most of those triangles into quads where possible.
If you’re not satisfied with having triangles, you’ll need like in the pre-Bmesh system, to delete the triangle , add an edge loop next to it to generate a vertice on one of the former triangle edge, then create a face from the hole.
Thanks Sanctuary, Your method was helpful in reducing my problem somewhat, I guess I just have to keep plugging away at it. I hope blender cookie or one of the other sites will really focus on this challenge, all I’ve seen so far are overviews of the basic tools because it is so new. When I first started learning blender, triangles and poles were always a bad thing I thought. But it seems difficult to get away from them if your going to use ngons. Thanks again- Carl
Here are a few things to get you started. Try searching deep in modeling forums. Not blender specific. Like http://forums.cgsociety.org/forumdisplay.php?f=25
Which has a huge topology discussion among other useful tidbits.