Fine-tuning the model

Our model could be considered done. It checks all the boxes – it’s mushroom-shaped and low poly. However, it’s still a very blocky, regular shape. It’s boring and uninteresting to look at.

We can take it a step further with something I call artistic modeling.

We’ll mess with the way the faces are positioned, how they’re shaped, and how many vertices they have. We’ll achieve a slightly more visually pleasing look, or at least something a little more interesting, using these techniques.

The first step is triangulation. But first, you need to learn some terminology.

Faces have different names depending on how many sides they have:

• A three-sided face is often called a triangle, or just a tri
• A face with four sides is known as a quad
• All faces with five or more sides are simply called n-gons (the word comes from polygon, with poly replaced by n, which means an arbitrary number of sides)
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