Quads vs Triangles (or other n-gons)

Comments

• Mada Posts: 2,043

  January 19

  1. You get better subdivision results with quad mesh. Triangles can cause irregularities, pinching, or distortion when subdivided, leading to artifacts in the mesh.

  2. Quads deform more predictably when rigged and animated. 

  3. Quads provide a clearer, more logical flow of edge loops - essential for modeling and making adjustments to the mesh.

  So the question would be - are you planning to morph the item or create JCMs? Use subdivision on it? If not - triangles should work fine
• riftwitch Posts: 1,439

  January 19

  Mada said:

  1. You get better subdivision results with quad mesh. Triangles can cause irregularities, pinching, or distortion when subdivided, leading to artifacts in the mesh.

  2. Quads deform more predictably when rigged and animated. 

  3. Quads provide a clearer, more logical flow of edge loops - essential for modeling and making adjustments to the mesh.

  So the question would be - are you planning to morph the item or create JCMs? Use subdivision on it? If not - triangles should work fine

  Thanks, that helps. The item works as is, but I want to add some geometry to cover specific areas of my character. I'll play around on my day off and see what happens. 
• riftwitch Posts: 1,439

  January 21

  riftwitch said:

  Mada said:

  1. You get better subdivision results with quad mesh. Triangles can cause irregularities, pinching, or distortion when subdivided, leading to artifacts in the mesh.

  2. Quads deform more predictably when rigged and animated. 

  3. Quads provide a clearer, more logical flow of edge loops - essential for modeling and making adjustments to the mesh.

  So the question would be - are you planning to morph the item or create JCMs? Use subdivision on it? If not - triangles should work fine

  Thanks, that helps. The item works as is, but I want to add some geometry to cover specific areas of my character. I'll play around on my day off and see what happens. 

  After working on the clothing a bit last night, it looks like it's going to be a lot of work to accomplish what I want to do. I may have better results using a custom transmap on a different item that already covers the area I need covered. 
• gregsgraphics_cafd0962a0 Posts: 112

  June 24

  Clothing can sometimes get away with being made from triangles, as long as it's intended for dynamic motion.  It helps the dynamics physics solvers to work faster, because the physics solver for the cloth doesn't have to convert the quads to triangles before calculating things like draping or motion.  However, editing these items and smoothing them for rendering is often complicated or impossible, so many people will retopo those clothing items and take the hit on performance when it comes to the calculations (which, with today's GPU acceleration of physics sims, isn't much of a hit anyway).  Every quad consists of two triangles, so it used to be the case that things like physics sims and other calculations needed to be converted to triangles first, so it was often faster just to keep them as triangles.  These days, it doesn't matter as much.  Ngons, on the other hand, still pose quite a few issues on anything except perfectly flat surfaces which will not be deformed in any way.  Even then, you can't subdivide ngons without doing some modifications first.  Also, notice that no cloth garment is ever made up of long, thin triangles.  They almost always use a specific triangulation algorithm, which is specifically intended for deformation and faster calculations.  It's called Delaunay triangulation.  In any case, quads are always the way to go to ensure compatibility and easy editing.