I don't know if this is true with other modeling apps or other peoples workflows.  But if you're putzing around with this stuff on your own, it's been my experience that (at least within zbrush), edgeloops make all sorts of things possible.  you might look at something like the back of the turtle shell, or the bottom of the boot and think that it'd be a royal pain.  But in both cases I started off with a smooth surface and just put the poly's into groups, added a couple edgeloops, and infated the centers of them. 

To make the grouping easier, I made each poly it's own uv group which then allowed me to use autogroup by uv's to make each poly it's own group.  I could then click in the middle of clusters of them and group them.

@Daz3d
@ShareCG