Excellent job! these are outstanding models… Keep going
Bravo! I attended a 3D animation school for 2.75 years and was NEVER taught this stuff! I had no idea how to place the loops! This is incredibly valuable!!!
PLEEEASE, continue this with best-practice-loops for the torso/shoulders/hips/groin! IF it is in another thread, tell me where!
I too have studied poly-based modeling for years and have never found as thorough and concise a tutorial on how and why to use poles and loops in this way ever, thank you!!!
Thanks a lot for this tutorial. 
Anyone still got the PDF? The link posted is broken, which is a shame because some of the pictures/animations are gone as well. I think a lot of users would benefit from the PDF being hosted somewhere permanently. 
Hi Cyaoeu,
I posted a copy of the Poles & Loops pdf for you here:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/5djua9he786yp9y/Poles and Loops.pdf
I’ll leave it there for others to download as well.
- Blend3D
wow so much information! Very usefull I’m glad somebody put all this information on the internet because it’s of vital importance to keep your meshes according to the rules. Too bad it is too much to read it all in one night 
Nice post…Thank you very much!!..
See if there is something I need! ~ ~
I’m finding that N (3 edge) polls can be a real pain when used to reduce the level of virts to say stitch something like a hand to an arm without introducing loads of edges along the arm, and subsiquently the torso.
What I have found, through lots of frustration, is that you need to be carefull that an N requires another N in exactly the same place usually on the opersite side of the mesh, but more correctly at the opersite end of the line of face loop(s).
eg. Two face loops start at the center of the back near the nape of the neck, they run over the shoulder and down the arm.
To reduce the Two face loops to one (2 into 1) to reduce the number of faces on the back an N is used. If this is only done say where the arm and shoulder meet then it will cause the loops to cross over (as bellow text) so another N (2 into 1) must be added say where the arm meets the hand. If this second (2 into 1) is not added the two face loops will continue down say the hand, finger, back up the finger, hand, and at some point potentialy, depending on how the flow progresses, cross over.
I say potentially because sometimes through luck and the mirror modifier the two returning face loops will span around say the chest, down the other arm/hand/finger, back up the arm, to the mirrored N (2 into 1) on the opersite shoulder.
As faces and bodies tipically tend to be built initially with the mirror modifier down the center line this happens automatically, in the case of the hand (picture) this doesn’t so care must be taken manually otherwise when adding edge loops what happens is that the edge loop will return and cross into its self causing a triangle.
When adding an edge loop it’s not easy with a large model to see if this happens, but after the first click you can tell if a problem has occured because you won’t be able to slide the loop before the usual second click.
This diagram shows how equal N (2 into 1)s must be placed on both the upper and lower parts of the hand and must be replicated for all the fingers.
If only the join between the little finger was (2 into 1)'nd then the resultant single face loop would travel around the hand over where the knuckles would be, under the palm, back up the side of the little finger and then cross over the (2 into 1) and that way leads into frustration and madness.
(Smoking cessation. Alcohol. Cold. Insomnia. Burp. Motion sickness. Molars. Drool. Stiff neck. Chilblains. Toothache. Teeth bleeding. Ulcer. Weight loss, etc.) - Qzone log | Back to logs list Reprinted from 181124802 at 13:39 on June 27, 2010 Reading (loading. …) Comments (0) Category: Personal Diary
This topic is very helpful! If I could vote or give “thanks” points, I would do it!
Thanks for sharing this knowledge maese toontje.
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The links in this post to this document are broken. Does this exist anywhere that it can be downloaded?
Thanks!
Thanks for creating this thread toontje. I typically save offline copies of such useful information and have created a single XHTML page with all the images currently visible as of this date (127). However, as already mentioned by others, a few images have been lost…12 by my estimate.
I used google to find the “Pools and Loops.pdf” file (16.4 MB) but it too is missing the same images.
Corniger, do you have the missing images in your archive? If so, please upload it to someplace like MediaFire and send me a link so I can complete the document and upload the full version.
Thanks,
LHammonds
Thanks for posting this link! My searches were only able to come up with dead links to the document. Now we just need to find the missing images or create them ourselves. I want to edit this most valuable document to clean up the language a bit and produce a new document, if we can get the images.
The XHTML file I have is fairly clean which contains only tutorial-type content as well as corrections to spelling and grammar. Just need the missing 12 or so images for it to be complete.
EDIT (4/21/2011): Corniger replied to my PM and confirmed my fears. He does not have the missing images either. That means I need to wrap up what I have and post it…which said-to-say is not much more than what’s contained in the PDF. Many of the images were the content itself and even if I knew everything going on, it would be difficult to extrapolate what was lost.
EDIT (7/6/2011): Thanks to jabeck, I now have an archive that may have many of the lost images contained in it. I will have to compare carefully to see what belongs and what does not as this was a copy from a different site and not this particular thread.
I have gone through and combined the information from the parent thread as well as the PDF. There was actually some information in the thread that was not in the PDF and vice versa. So I have a fairly complete document that I had gone through and made and editing pass on.
The only thing that is still missing are the original images.
Thank god this thread exists!