Ngons and Triangles

• Are Ngons (anything over a quad (4 sides) is considered an ngon) and Triangles Bad?
  Yes, they are bad in 3D animation pipeline. You will likely find and fix ngons and triangles of your 3D models especially organic forms.
  
  
  • Common issues
    
    • Subdividing
      Ngons and triangles both cause issues when trying to smooth a model. The extra vertices and edges can cause some very strange bumpiness in the model that would otherwise not occur if the model was made up of quads.
      
      
    • Rendering
      Ngons and triangles can also cause some strange issues at render time. While everything may look good in the workspace, once rendered you may notice some very strange artifacts happening. The only way to really avoid this is to go back and clean up the ngons on your model.
      
      
    • Deforming
      Ngons typically cause a lot of issues when deforming the model. If your model is going to be passed down the pipeline to be rigged and animated, then a quad-based topology is a must. While triangles are a little more lenient and not as bad as ngons, they still can cause some issue at animation time. Topology that isn't clean means a model that is going to be sent back to you for fixes.
      
      
    • Teaxturing
      It is also difficult to texture a model with ngons.
      
      
      
  • How to fix ngons and triangles in Maya
    
    • Remesh and Retopologize
    • Mesh > Cleanup
    • Manually
      
      
      
  • Conclusion
    • A very important reason for avoiding ngons and triangles is that quads are really the industry-accepted polygon.
      
      
    • If you send in a 3D demo reel with a wireframe overlay and your model's topology is made up of a miss match of quads, triangles and ngons of all different edge amounts then the message you're sending the recruiter is that you don't spend the time to properly topologize your model to work within the other areas of the pipeline like texturing, rigging and animating.
      
      
  • Exceptions
    
    
    • If you have a static mesh that would not be deformed, there is no need to remove ngons.
      
      
    • If you're working in a game engine like Unity that uses triangles, your mesh will be triangulated on import.
      
      
    • You can hide the triangles at a place that the viewer is never going to see them.