You should also remember that it's a matter of how you place your topology, so it's not necessarily wrong, but if things aren't placed optimally then you'll get errors. See the following. Also my attempt at that gun thing?
Not sure what I'm doing wrong here... Both getting smoothing errors. The vertical Cylinder is 16 sides, horizontal intersecting one is 8 sides Sorry for posting so much recently too :P Cheers :)
Honestly, the fact that you had to point out the error, means its minor enough not to worry about. It would be good to see your attempts to add further detail, without that its hard to give any additional advice.
Looks good to me, you've achieved accuracy whilst there's some minor shading errors at the bases of the outer tooth ring however alongside the inner part, regardless of it's perceived inefficient topology, this object should as a whole bake down fine.
I definately did this, in my third picture. For some reason it was still giving a nasty error, but not all the way down the cylinder. Like I said, I'm probably doing something else wrong, but I did terminate the loop.
Floating bits are most definitely used. I think theres an easy option to turn off shadow casting on backfacing geo in max, but no option like that in xnormal. But regardless, painting out the AO errors is WAYYYYYY faster than the alternative.
There's a big difference between pointing out an error in someones work/art is a silly way, and directing personal criticisms at people. People learn by arguing and discussing work and practices, there's normally a optimal way to do things, but that depends on a lot of factors.
http://imgur.com/a/fDkSy took a week of trial and error found out a way to get it perfect i didn't set any hard edges in it yet, afterward i found some areas with dents only seen from the side.
The first link doesnt work for me "Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete." Second link works though :) *edit* how odd. It downloaded the pdf but gave me that error. nothing to see here ;)
The black piece with the horizontal slits. Creating those circular holes isn't too hard because they're on the flat sides. The slits, however, are right on the rounded edges and I don't know how to make those without anny pinching errors.