All aboard the crazy train that tries to say "The only valid n-gon has more the three sides and less then five". I SAY: POPPYCOCK! SHINNANAGINS! WHERE IS MY BROOM!
I have commented on this topic numerous times!
I am not saying go out of you way to make ngons and triangles. Triangles are hard to avoid at times and as far as ngons they can always be turned into quads and triangles. The key is to understand how your model is to be smoothed and whether it will be deformed. Triangles are very useful in reducing mesh density and edge congestion in narrowing areas of a model and therefore can be beneficial.
In the end no matter what you build gets triangulated. From my experience maya appears to be the only program that goes ape shit when texturing non-quad models. If you look at the models built in lightwave for TV series like BSG and Stargate they boolean the piss out of their models to cut panels and windows and such using stencil and solid drill operations creating n-gons up the kazoo and go straight to production with them!
Try to bring one of those models into Maya and it would cough up a lung! I read an article where they imported the starship model (from the new stargate) from lightwave into maya and it took a week of rebuilding the model to get maya to digest it! To me that is a MAYA weakness! In an industry that is always under pressure to produce in short time frames, why add such a time and life leeching constraint as to force all model to be 100% quad? Maybe that is why those series and studios use Lightwave and not Maya. In any event the Lightwave and Modo rendering systems are lightyears ahead of maya's which has not been updated for to many YEARS!
So part of the issue with maya is its renderer is not ngon and tri frendly (in fact back in the day, around Maya 4, mental ray would not render a model at all if it had a single ngon or tri in it! You would get a blank screen). So the ngon / tri phobia has a historical context in Maya as well.
Look at Modo, Lightwave, Max just to name a few alternate modeling apps and they are far less freaked out by tri's and ngons.
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." Sir Isaac Newton, 1675
Last edited by ctbram; 04-08-2011 at 11:43 AM.