3 and n-side poly question
 

I am a newb modeler and I was wondering about 3 side and n-side poly's.

I am having a hard time keeping my models light and one of the major causes is trying to keep everything to quads.

Very often on a long model to convert one 3-sided poly to a quad I have to split 50+ polygons just to add one edge to a tri!

When I start trying to add muscle details on an organic model I very quickly end up with a completely unmanagable number of edges and start getting unwanted bunching of contour lines.

Since most final renders are done on a smoothed poly surface and smoothing has the added benifit of converting all the n-polys and tri's to quads is it better to keep the model lite and allow a couple n-side and tri's in the mesh?


PS - I don't see why the Maya developers can't add a function to automatically quadrangulate a mesh without adding super heavy geometry?

While I am on the subject of trying to keep a model lite are there any built in features of Maya to optimize a mesh to try to reduce the geometry? I have played with the reduce command but have found it almost always just creates a totally wanked useless geometry.

What would ne nice would be a function that simply took even slices in x, y, and z through a model surface to crated a perfectly evenly spaces surface. I could think of several cases where something like this would be very useful.

Its is very hard to keep a mash 100% quads..... A few tris in the model wont hurt just really try and stay away from the 5 sided faces. The reduce option is ok but some times you get nasty looking results.