To Ngon or not to Ngon?

[Anonymous No.712931]

Pretty much every instructor I had kept telling the class "No Ngons!, Ever!" so when I model I try to avoid them and spend a lot of time cleaning up my model to avoid them.

But when I see a lot of professional modellers like Vitaly Bulgarov for example, I see Ngons all over the place and their renders look perfect.

So is it really necessary to avoid them at all costs, or does it really matter?

Pic for example, great model but filled with Ngons.

[Anonymous No.712933]

>>712931
Take it as a civil act, it's not the right thing but it's now bad in certain terms.

Ngons are harmless in planar surfaces or on objects that will never deform.

In resume use them wisely, we're in 2020, you can boolean the shit out of everything and use zbrush or instant remesh to fix it so you don't kill yourself.

[Anonymous No.712937]

That's not a polygonal model. It's made with T-Splines, I think.

[Anonymous No.712939]

>>712931
it did matter with older renderers, now they are handled just fine
but yeah avoid them if you can, if you can't then don't bother: speed and appearing quality is the only thing that matters. only other modellers will appreciate the beautiful wire and we are not your customers. if your model looks fine, then it's fine even if the wire is a fucking mess.

[Anonymous No.712942]

>>712933
For someone who doesn't use zbrush, are there other alternatives for remeshing a model? I primarily work in Modo/Max. Going to still download the free trial and see how.

[Anonymous No.712944]

>>712942
Right now?

Yes, and not one or two but like fifty.

There's even something called instant meshes which is a standalone app for quad remeshing.

Or just google "your favorite software quad remesh"

[Anonymous No.712967]

>>712931
That wireframe is not accurate if that's what you're implying.

[Anonymous No.712990]

>>712942
Look up Exoside, it's the guy who made ZBrush's remesher, now making an improved version as a plug-in for DCCs.

[Anonymous No.712995]

>>712931
>Pretty much every instructor I had kept telling
That's what you get from listening to instructors instead of learning yourself.
Instructors are often just talentless hacks, who got the job, because e.g. they had two years of Maya experience in 2007. Most often they just don't bother keeping up with technological progress and will teach you outdated stuff.
Art schools and universities are the biggest ripoff regarding quickly advancing, technical fields.
If you are paying for these courses, stop. Just get your hands on the best, most modern video courses and learn from industry talents instead of paying 100k for lazy idiots and bureaucrats.

[Anonymous No.713003]

>>712931
You may think this model has ngons, but its only whats shown to you, in reality the software triangulates the mesh on the fly, some software on other hand dosnt use polys and just uses standard rasterization gimmick of drawing lines and filling them with color.
But if you plan on making game or movie art for animation and real time and not just static renders you sadly cant use ngons. Ngons gonna be triangulated at random creating shading errors or breaking the mesh completely, also unmatching procedural trangulation will make normal maps fail, and in animation they will make the mesh explode.

Personally i use what ever i can to make the high poly, booleans, ngonas so bad they clip through parts of mesh and floating geo, i dont care. If it bakes right its good enough for me, i paint out the AO errors by hand in less than 5 minutes vs hours spent applying and fixing flooaters and booleans.
In fact some of my models have such fucking bad topo i often just go in and fix some of it to make it less ugly to look at.
Then when i make animation ready stuff i prioritize quad geo as much as possible, and put triangles in only sporadically to keep constant quad density for animation deformation.

>>712990
>>712942
I tried the quad remesher for geo cleanup, but so far i found no use for it, the results are never good enough to continue modeling. Zbrush remesher is still more advanced and offers more options as its integrated into other tools while this is a stand alone plugin.

[Anonymous No.713241]

>>712995
>Instructors are often just talentless hacks, who got the job

My instructor used to work for ILM and the head of the department used to work for Pixar, so they aren't talentless hacks.

[Anonymous No.713489]

>>712995
>If you are paying for these courses, stop. Just get your hands on the best, most modern video courses and learn from industry talents instead of paying 100k for lazy idiots and bureaucrats.

THIS. my guy op, if you wanna learn this stuff, just piss around at home for a while.

oh and to answer your question, the general rule of thumb on ngons is "don't use them on curved surfaces". if it's a flat face, ngons are fine and in fact I prefer them over a triangle decomposition in these cases since if I need to modify that part of the mesh, there's not a bunch of wireframe in my face, actions like inset in blender will nicely go over the entire face without trouble, and it's easy to work with

likewise, if you do the one thing you aren't supposed to do and use ngons over a curved or irregular surface, you're going to have a very very very bad day.

imo the professor was just saying that as a scapegoat excuse to avoid having to explain ^, but what 712995 said is super true

[Anonymous No.713504]

>>712942
Zremesher aka QuadRemesh is available for all 3d programs. The people who develop the algorithm for zbrush have released it. It's like $20 then you can remash exactly the same as you would in zbrush in Maya/max/blender/I'm actually not sure what else it's available for. Probably HOUDINI'S

[Anonymous No.713505]

>>713003
>Zbrush remesher is still more advanced
It's not, it's literally behind the plugin actually.

[Anonymous No.713561]

>>713003
You may think this model has been triangulated, but in reality it's a NURBS model.

[Anonymous No.713586]

>>713561
>You may think this model has been triangulated, but in reality it's a NURBS model.
Nurbs are still normally still triangulated on the fly for rendering,
Per pixel Nurbs rendering is slow as fuck and slower the more complex the model is, since you know, it basically creates a vertex and vertex normal per pixel, and that's a lot of points to create in a single frame.

[Anonymous No.713587]

>>713505
>It's not, it's literally behind the plugin actually.
What?
And it is, i use them both, i have both version if front my at this very second of writing this as im modeling something, and the zbrush one plain up offers more utility and options.

[Anonymous No.713612]

>>712931
this model was mad using a cad program, but in my opinion when modeling its ok to have n-gons just make sure when sub dividing they don't give you shading mistakes or pinching but for the most part they are fine.

[Anonymous No.714171]

>>712931
Theyre not ILLEGAL anymore but they can still mess your model a bit up so avoid em

In my company were using a custom web viewer and ngons simply leave holes in the geometry. Stuff like that may happen

[Anonymous No.714223]

>>714171
>ngons simply leave holes in the geometry
what the actual fuck and how did your codemonkeys get away with this in 2019 AD

[Anonymous No.717049]

>>712931
Is that a shaded wireframe?
I don't know what software that's in, but in blender when I'm in Dev Look mode, it doesn't show all the edges on my mode.
Just the ones that have over a certain amount of change in the angle between faces.
I think I fuck something up in my viewport render setting, and that might be what's going on there.
I'm just guessing.

But you professor are right, any NGONs you have the program has to fill in the Polly's by guessing and create a hell of a mess at less get down to squares, or whatever we call them here.

[Anonymous No.717075]

>>712931
If it's planar and non-deforming like in a lot of mechanical & static props then it's definitely negligible.

[Anonymous No.717137]

>>717049
OP's model is done in Fusion 360. Those are T-Spline patches, IIRC they are a superset of NURBS.

[Anonymous No.717142]

>>717137
>T-Splines
This. Incredibly flexible and allows for some unique but still perfect topology.

[Anonymous No.717257]

>>717142
I read the wiki on tsplines, and it go way over my head. I'm just a hobbyist who makes low Polly stuff, like building kits for Morrowind.
I can hardly understand subsurface multiplier, is it like that, or something more advanced, or something completely different?

[Anonymous No.717263]

>>717257
≥subsurface Modifier
Can't type nothing without my phone spell check changing something last minute

[Anonymous No.717635]

>>717257
In the end it's still NURBS, just more efficient and easy to use than a decade ago. Like all things in 3D, it's complicated until it isn't.

[Anonymous No.720060]

>>712931
>Vitaly Bulgarov for example
He's a CONCEPT ARTIST.
His CONCEPTS get handed off to the production modelers who either fix his models or make something from scratch that looks like his CONCEPTS. He gets paid for stuff that just looks cool, but art not rigged/deform. I haven't watched him in years,

I don't even think he UV maps anything. Just applies a material in keyshot.

[Anonymous No.720061]

>>712931
>Pretty much every instructor I had kept telling the class "No Ngons!, Ever!"
technically yo model will work but your employer will also yell this at you, so being a professionally trained trained wagie as you are, you did as told

[Anonymous No.720062]

>>717142
this is way too high iq for /3/ polygon rasheesh