Topology before beauty
A mesh that renders once only has to survive one render. A mesh that ships has to survive three agencies, a rebrand, and whoever opens it in 2029.
The prettiest render we made last year came off a mesh we would now refuse to hand over. It looked correct from the one angle the brief asked for and fell apart the moment a different agency needed it forty degrees to the left.
What we check before a surface goes on
- Quads, and the reason for every triangle. Triangles are allowed. Unexplained ones are not.
- Edge flow that follows the manufacture. A drawn part flows differently from a moulded one, and a subdivision surface tells on you either way.
- Scale in real units. A bottle that is 0.5 units tall is a bottle nobody can light with a real-world softbox.
- Naming that survives export.
bottle_shoulder_LbeatsCylinder.017, forever.
Flat, never bent
Our shorthand for this is flat, never bent — the mesh should still be clean when it reaches the viewport, not straightened out in post by a displacement map that hides the crime. Bent meshes always come back. Usually during a relaunch, usually on a Friday.
The good news is that this is cheap. Building clean costs maybe a tenth more time up front and saves entire weeks the second time the object is used. Which, for anything worth modelling, there always is.