Maya Topology Problem:Tris and N-Gons
Hey guys.There is a question i came to my mind when following a Course from DT.I got no experience about this so help me out 
the Modeling tutor always said to keep QUADS and few triangle if u can't get rid of them But never N-Gons.
But When i Going through their course Quick start to modeling He uses Nurbs Curves to draw a Leg (robot's leg) and he use Bevel plus to extrude it out and it leaves a HUGE 2 N-Gons caps in the front of the leg and the back.so why does he did it? (he didn't smoothed it)
did i missed something he said? do i need to cut those n-gons to quads? or can i leave them as they are?
and when i following a UV course there was a asset created for a video game (according to the tutor) and it was FULL Of TRIS not a single quad? why is that? (sorry if my lack of knowledge lead this to a stupid question)
thanks.
here is the images
http://prntscr.com/61atbq -robot drone
http://prntscr.com/61arwy - video game asset
the Modeling tutor always said to keep QUADS and few triangle if u can't get rid of them But never N-Gons.
But When i Going through their course Quick start to modeling He uses Nurbs Curves to draw a Leg (robot's leg) and he use Bevel plus to extrude it out and it leaves a HUGE 2 N-Gons caps in the front of the leg and the back.so why does he did it? (he didn't smoothed it)
did i missed something he said? do i need to cut those n-gons to quads? or can i leave them as they are?
and when i following a UV course there was a asset created for a video game (according to the tutor) and it was FULL Of TRIS not a single quad? why is that? (sorry if my lack of knowledge lead this to a stupid question)
thanks.
here is the images
http://prntscr.com/61atbq -robot drone
http://prntscr.com/61arwy - video game asset
Replies
There is a massive thread somewhere on polycount going into the ins and outs of Quads. I don't blame you for being confused.
The reasons for modelling in quads are they are neat and have established edge flow which makes modelling, animation deformation easier. Most modellers will create a basemesh from Quads. They make a good 'working mesh'.
Quads
However when being rendered all the renering engines interpret quads as two triangles back to back (alongs the hypotenuse). so strictly speaking renderers do not need quads, they only make your life easier.
Some software workflows demand quads (off the top of my head wetas Massive used to require em to run crowds across, and there are a few more examples i can't think of off the top of my head, but generally triangles are acceptable in most situations.
NGons
Ngons ( any poly with more than 4 sides) do tend to cause a few issues, as some software (zbrush i'm looking at you) doesn't know how to interpret them, so will error (sometimes it'll offer to convert ngons to triangles for you). Others will just crash out. while you can get away with NGons, as a rule of thumb you might want to take a 'last resort' mentality to them.
Tris
In the interests of lower topology (smaller models = more models can be loaded) most assets get stripped down (decimated) after the basemesh is finished. most commonly these will be triangles which work fine in just about every 3D game ever.
You'll still want to have an 'edge loop' around bending joints etc on organic models, or you'll get strange deformation, but certainly for hard surface models they tend to end up as tris only.
hope this helps, until someone can find the detailed thread with examples of why ngons are great.
There are a few rules like making sure you triangulate the mesh before baking normals, but as a general rule n-gons are fine. As are triangles.