N-Gons and Hardsurface workflow

Jaston3D

So i'm currently watching Tim Bergholz Hardsurface tutorial making an AKM. I've done lots of hardsurface work in the past but it never hurts to see other peoples methods and workflows especially if they are better than me. I just finished the first modeling video and many times just in the first part of the video he makes edge connects that create n gons or caps a face that has much more than 4 verts. Every time it happens I follow along but I kind of second guess on why i'm not making a complete loop with the edge or connecting all the verts so that they are appropriate poly's. Can someone explain his method here and why it's okay to do this? Does he go back and fix all this later? Whats his trick?

Neox

does it shade good? problem solved

don't waste your time on geometry that does nothing to yoir final output, and which might slow you down in case of changes.
you can get away with A LOT on flat surfaces. on curved ones there are times when 5 sided ngons or triangles shade better than quads, so why not use them? Quadonly is a stupid myth that serves no one, i think it helps in the beginning forcing people to think more and work cleaner, but you will get past this point.

Gazu

As Neox said. You can have countless n-gons in your HighPoly when the Shading or the Light hits the Surface nicely.
Mostly on Flat Surfaces its absolutely no problem. So set your Modeling Material to a High Spec and Gloss Value and start to model :-) (so its easy to see if the Surface shades well)

Jaston3D

Thanks for the fast reply guys! Do you have to go back though when making the low poly and fix the ngons or can you just leave them? 

Kid.in.the.Dark

Also, on the technical side of it... I kind of overlooked this myself until recently but the idea of creating a perfect non-Ngon model is just an illusion of the mind. Many people have already mentioned that as long as it's shaded well, it's fine... but also when you turbo smooth anything it automatically quads your model for you. Thus the Ngons left in your subdivision mesh no longer have Ngons after your turbo smooth has been applied, also a reason why Max doesn't give you a Ratsnest error while exporting it as well.

Gazu

For the LowPoly its good to connect all to Triangles before you bake. N-Gons in a LowPoly will cause Shading Errors. And try to make the Triangles as Wide as possible, not to long and dont connect 10000 Vertices to 1 Vertex. But it also depends on your Smoothing Groups. If the UV is completely Flat, then nevermind about the tips written above.

ActionDawg

You can construct the low poly however you want as well, but the important thing is that you triangulate the mesh before baking anything. That's because especially for normal maps the shading is dependent on the low poly's normals so if a quad gets cut one way versus the other, the data in the normal map can bake out differently. Locking this down by turning everything to triangles lets you not have to worry when it comes to bake time.

It all comes down to shading in the end