Torquinox posted at 8:28PM Fri, 08 January 2021 - #4409759

I see.

I'm a little surprised about how hard surface plugins for Blender throw concern over topology to the wind. It seems like there is this attitude that Blender is fine with n-gons, and it's ok do have a ton of them all over the place. I've seen it in loads of tutorials.

Yet, there are many other tutorials that place good topology at the top of the list for building good models. I tend to think we want good topology in order to prevent weirdness in renders and to enhance portability. But the models built using those plugins look great as long as you don't look too closely at the underlying geometry. It's maddening.

Yep, I've noticed that ngons have been far more accepted in recent years, even by professionals. I remember when this was absolutely taboo for production models, even for hard surface objects. I sell models on Turbosquid and CGT, and ngons are still typically frowned upon if you sell models there, unless you explicitly mention ttheir use and show wires of the models upfront. Out of the 200+ commercial models I've created over the years, exactly zero have used ngons in the final product. However, that is about to change. I just recently completed a low poly sci-fi building pack for Blender where I used a lot of boolean operations for the creation of about 80 buildings. All of them contain ngons because it allowed me to get through 80+ models in about a week. This will be my first product where ngons were explicitly and intentionally utilized as part of the finished product. The models are intended for use only in Blender as static objects, and using the ngons allowed me to create a lot more detail with minimal polygon count. Each model is less than 100 polygons. It would have been impossible to do using quads.

I will not make this process a habit. I still prefer to use only quads in all my models. Quads are just much cleaner and provide a much more flexible workflow to anyone using the models.

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