Topology and Tris help

I’m having some real problems, here’s some back story. For two years I’ve been learning all quad modeling and topology. However my original exposure to 3D modeling was, well I don’t know what you would call it. Japanese style 3D modeling maybe? Greater use of bendy straw and triangles. Even in sub-d modeling. It’s not quite modeling for a game engine, but its closer than all quad.

My major problem is thus, no matter what i do (even in sub-d modeling) all quads doesn’t look right to me. It’s too even/smooth. Sometimes I really want the pinch of a triangle when I sub-d. Far less frequently i end up wanting to quickly reduce the number of edges. I’m aware that in the latter case I can use quad based step-downs, but I end up having to create extra geometry for it.

So that said is it really that bad? Reading over sub-d and topology threads; people seem to have a pathological fear of tris in English speaking modeling communities. When I go back to using a few tris the resultant subdivided model looks better to me and it’s easier for me to weight paint. All with many less polygons after subdivision than my all quad version.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Modeling/Meshes/Editing/Faces#Beauty_Fill This specific tool should help you, but study all of the tools on the page.