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> Renderers love triangles, FE solvers love boring quads.

Btw even in Blender (which is pure visual rendering) people prefer quads. The common wisdom is that you should keep your topology quads with nice rectangle-ish aspect ratios if you can at all. It is not that triangles don't work, but they have a tendency to do visually unpleasant silly things when animated or sculpted or subdivided.



The "quads only" rationalizations come off as quite cargo-culty.

Sure, edge rings won't have dead ends, and that's useful when adding edge loops to increase detail, but doesn't necessarily mean the topology is of high quality. Using only quads some cursed helix type topology can be constructed.

First thing subdivision will do on non-quads is ortho(1) operator, so a nice averaged vertex in the middle will be added. High side count cylinders will have weird saddles around caps, but that's due to subdivision being wrong tool for the task.

Quads can be abused to look bad too. If a mesh looks bad, it's a bad mesh. If animated mesh looks bad, it's bad rigging and skinning. Knowing "this one industry secret" won't fix those.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway_polyhedron_notation#Ori...




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