First of all, let me say that I’m not a graphic designer, architect or anything related to drawing. I’m a veterinarian.
The point is that I don’t understand why some people, as soon as they see a 3D model, start asking “can we see the wires”?
Is it to study how the figure was made?, to see if the author is “cheating” (joining shapes together instead of modeling from one solid block)?
Saludos.
Or perhaps they see other people ask the same question, and therefor think it’s a normal way to comment on a piece they like? 
My real guess would be to study the piece.
you guesses are right
most of the time it’s to study how the author created his model. a good example of it is when someone make a character. It’s to study the anatomy, see if the loops are well made, or to learn how to do them.
If it’s a game model, showing the wire can help the people to critics the model itself. By giving advice to which part of the model could be optimised if some verts are useless etc…
So yea, showing the wire of a mesh is to help the viewer at learning, or commenting the modelling of the creator.
it also allows to comment on how it might behave if animated, suggest places where detail is wasted, or perhaps places which could use more detail
duhast 3d modeling and animation is cheating.
you cannot reproduce something in blender you have in real life.
so the term cheating kinda offends me here.
one must learn how to cheat because that is what 3d is about.
simulating the real reality.
claas
if i built a car, would you like to look under the hood to see if there is a high performance engine as well as a nice paint job?
Personally I find it useful to see a wireframe as I’m fairly new to 3d programs as it has helped me to understand how loops should flow on a model. I would urge anyone new to 3d to study wires of good models or bad even to learn where mistakes occur and what difficultes arise from that and also to get idea of how more complex parts of model are created such as wrinkles for example.
Also if someone is planning on animating a character an early post in works in progress with a wire can make it easier for other people to comment on any bad loops or topology which could cause serious problems in the animating process.
To put it shortly please post a wire with your work of art, as this does help other newbies/experienced users learn faster or in the latter case make USEFUL comments about your work.
Levi
Yup… all that.
And it looks cool 
You misunderstood what I wrote. I put the word cheating between inverted commas.
hi
well that is what you wrote:
(joining shapes together instead of modeling from one solid block)
modeling out of one piece is one way but that is not the only and correct
way. less geometry means also less memory usage and you do not need to model what you dont see anyway.
no hard feelings here from my seide anyway.
btw are you new to 3d or blender?
you mentioned that you are a veterinarian?
do you do some 3d in this area?
claas
THis is a quite dumb question or topic. If you know anything about 3D modeling you should know that we want to see the wires for some points:
the way it’s modeled and subsurfed, a wire shows how the model technic of someone is. People can learn from this. If a newbie starts modeling, he’ll see that when he starts modeling something like a bottle, that he can’t get the bottom flat if he just makes a bottle made of big cubes. And showing a wire from a experienced modeler should show that he made the bottom flat by adding a few extruded parts that are 1 milimeter close to each other to archive a flat bottle bottom.
the detail, a wire can show that you can archive very clean smooth models with a few faces, while another people try the same and use hunderds of faces to make it smooth, but a experienced modeler can show you that you just need to set the subsurf level on a specifique value to archive a nice smoothness even with a few faces.
Wires are really usefull for newbies. It shows the way of modeling models. Then if someone really wants to learn modeling, he watchs the wires, and try to archive the same. This is how modeling tutorials are made. Use not too much faces to create a nice model. Make it yourself easy then trying to model a nice smooth alien with 1000.000 faces while you could just use 3000 of them. 
Quite intolerant for a moderator.
duhast: JD-multi is an excellent moderator. He is very tolerant, and I’m sure it wasn’t meant in a demeaning way.
JD-Multi is a good moderator, but if he had read duhast’s question he should have seen that he hasn’t any experience in 3D or graphics, he is a veterinarian.
Knowing that he shouldn’t have said that it was a very dumb question. A lot of questions on this forum will appear ‘dumb’ in the eyes of a 3D-expert. But every 3D-expert was once a newbie also…
yep
cekuhnen
simulating the real reality
are you really sure this is the real reality and the world inside the blender window is not the real reality, maybe this reality is just some fat guy sitting on a couch passed out, with doritos laying on his bellies, dream, and were all just the product of eating junk food before falling asleep?
why would anyone be offended by someone asking an honest question? not like he came to your house and screamed it in your ear?
???
So how is emphasising on something that somebody already said he doesn’t know much about good moderating? Sounds to me he didn’t read the question in the first place (or thought vegetarian* is a food habit, but that would be really dumb). And since when are there dumb questions? Tsss.
Anyway,
my answer would be to check if it was done in 3d. Sometimes some pictures are so incredibly simular to photos you might want to challenge the creator to show the wires. Then be flabbercasted even more on the incredible work.
How is that important for trying to simulate it?
*yes I know thats not how you spell it.
A lot of times I just like to see a wireframe because I find it looks cool, but indeed the other reasons mentioned here are all valid.
Aah sorry for reply I did about dumb question and topic. Sometimes things are soo logic, I mean, with a little more thinking you ofthen know a good answer. Same as when someone paints a good painting, with nice shadows and such, cool colors and much more, people could ask for a sketch, why?
Well Sketches show the main idea, sometimes you see lines that are drawn but not drawn on the orginal painting. These lines show the progress in making an idea, or show the basics behind the light, shadow and objects with just outlines. Take a sketch from a manga movie, you’ll see things that just aren’t there on a final movie, like cirkels drawn to make nice heads or stick figures showing the setup of a character. THe same goes for wireframes, it shows the plain original of a mesh. I find those wires quite cool 2 like Timothy, and you can learn much more of that then just sitting at your chair and model and model but not know how do model.
I don’t see myself as a experienced modeling person if it comes to nice renders and smooth models. But I modeled for months game characters and such to practise. And what’s cooler then asking a wireframe model of a Half Life2 alien or something like that. I even used WarCraft3 models to figure out how they make less then 300 poly models for games, what’s the technic behind it to keep the polycount really low, but still show people what the model has to be, knight, orc, giant or else.
I hope the another reply wasn’t to personal. Sorry fro that. 
qwed88
do you realy want to get into detail with this philosophical question?
as i wrote in another post offended did not hit the nail.
english isnt my first language so soemtimes i missuse a word.
i second more what JD-multi said. the questions was so logical
that i could not see the point because with logical thinking
the answer will appear on its own. sometimes …
peace out 