Models that come with Lightwave
 

I was going through the models that come with lightwave just for reference to try to develop some stratagy and they actually made me more confused. Here are 2 examples.

One is this mug here. It seems way heavy on the polys to me for what it is. Am I right?

http://astro.temple.edu/~bforce/images/cup.gif

Also I found this image of a halfpipe. This is half of it. Shouldnt all those verts run around the pipe? By my count each side of the halpipe has enough verts on it to make 38 edges for each poly.

http://astro.temple.edu/~bforce/images/halfpipe.gif

Can you guys clue me in on some of this?

Thanks.

The only reason the cup has so many poly's is because the creator froze the object for better smoothness. You don't have to make it so high poly.

For the half-pipe i think that the creator was going for some kind of low-poly look so he didn't bother making the side polygons.

Are these the answers you were looking for?

You also have to remember that the free content for LW has been building up over an incredibly long period of years. The coffee cup for instance is a holdover from the pre-LW6 days when a subdivision surface couldn't be loaded directly into Layout, but needed to be frozen first.

These are the answeres I was looking for. How about this tutorial:

4 Point Triangles

Just doesnt seem right to me to be modeling and have this poly set in your final mesh:

http://www.newtek.com/products/light...s/step_005.jpg

How about that?

There's a very good reason for this, and its all because subpatches can only be three or four point polygons (and three point polys are not recommended).

Therefore, you strive to have as many four point polys as possible to obtain a nice smooth surface. If you were going to remain purely as polygons, then you're correct that it makes no sense to have that sort of geometry.

How come triangles are not recommended over squares? I never understood that. Is it only for "smoother" surfaces?

Triangles cannot be non-planar.

The problem comes down to the smoothing algorithms used in creating subpatched objects.

Having triangles in a subpatched surface is all fine and dandy as long as they're in a relatively flat section of the mesh. If they happen to be in an area with some amount of curvature then you end up with a 'point' appearing in the surface, and usually, no amount of playing about with the placement of the vertices will shift it.