Quote: "heres why it would be harder to uv map.... you have one a cylinder clipping through a plane. the cylinder gets uv unwraped and so does the rest of the gun including the plane that you clippped through. You have no references to were the edges meet. Which means that youll have guess and use trial and error to get that part right."
Well obviously.
I covered this in my post, that creates no seams if you just UV and texture it correctly, sure it makes it a bit more of a hassle but that's just what it is; a bit.
And I think a bit of hassle is worth trading if you get less polygons, a cleaner mesh, and make it easier to animate.
Quote: "But: i want to restate the above triangles are ok in mesh. In general keeping quads as often as possible will keep you mesh clean but in all actuality if you think about it a plane only needs to be defined by 3 points so really all your quads are really triangles anyway. there just defined with 4 ponts and a middle edge. Heres were this matters. Triangles generally terminate edge loops, making editability harder, and also can (not always) create problems when skinning... but triangles tend to deform better on lower poly models. So basically you really need to use them sparingly when modeling but you dont have to be completely anal like everyone seems to think... just what i think anyway..."
Yes, as you seem to have just realized, all polygons boil down to triangles, this is a fact. And is why things like games use triangle count as their polygon count; the models always get their previous polygons cut into tri's. The reason why a person would want to keep their model in quads is because of how it'll make it (Generally) deform better in animation, at least in the case of organic models that well, actually deform.
Triangles do, as you rightly say, indeed terminate edge loops, and while it could make the model harder to manage as you mentioned, terminating edge loops on mechanical models and the like is generally not a bad thing. Since there's no need for deforming on things like guns, there's not much need to keep even and well flowing edge loops, since they'll just waste polygons.
These days when gun models are so dependent on things like normal and specular maps really you just want a mesh that can hold all of the detail that the high detail gun already has but still retain a small polygon count, so triangles are, and should be, used heavily.
Alucard94, lacking proper intelligence.
