bantha posted at 1:21PM Mon, 11 February 2019 - #4345738

operaguy posted at 3:20AM Sun, 10 February 2019 - #4345693

[bantha]

4. "La Femme's base mesh is very light weight, but since it works that well with SubD, it's relatively easy to add even the finest detail to the mesh, as long as your machine can handle the polygons. V4 has [too many polys]" -- True, if that slows you down, a lighter-weight base is better.

V4 has too many poles. Poles are points in the mesh that cannot be smoothed by subdivision. I even linked a thread in it which explained what poles are, where to put them, what their problems are. Too many polys isn't what I meant. "Unsuitable geometry" would be better to describe it.

With a figure like La Femme, you can have a low poly figure in the viewport, saving memory when it counts and making posing more fluent. Still you can render a high detail mesh in the final render. You can reduce La Femme's subdivision in the viewport without any differences in the render, V4 is much more polygon heavy than this. Still you will get every detail from Blackhearteds HD morphs when rendering. Try that with V4, it will not work quite as good. The mesh wasn't built for subdivision.

5-pointed poles are not a problem in most cases - provided they're used sparingly and placed properly. Every mesh has poles, they're unavoidable. The bad poles that should be avoided at all times are the 6+ pointed ones, which are what older figures like Miki and the G2 series are riddled with. And they're always avoidable just by redirecting the edgeflow in those areas slightly. Often it's due to the mesh being too dense to begin with. You should only add geometry where the shape you're trying to achieve requires it. When you have more geometry than what you actually need, you start running into issues where 6 (or more) pointed poles(stars) start appearing. But this really only applies to organic shapes and doesn't really matter with hard surface models for the most part, since they generally aren't being rigged and posed. But even with that, only add geometry when you need it to achieve the shape you're aiming for.