Does topology, ngon matter in 3D printing?

[vindegosh]

Hello everyone. I am a beginner in learning blender for 3D printing purposes. When I am searching for YouTube tutorials, I found that people always mention stuff like topology management, avoid creating ngon, keeping faces to be quadrilateral, etc. Are these things only matter for those who use blend for 3D animation? How does ngon affect the 3D model's printed out product? Thanks in advance.

[Worker11811]

It all depends... having n-gons in your model isn't necessarily a problem if you only use them on flat surfaces like floors, walls or the flat base of a 3-D printed object. However, if you have n-gons in the main model's mesh, itself (a part that has a more complex shape) it can cause problems.

The same goes for triangles vs. quads. In some areas, it doesn't matter. In other areas, it will.

As a general rule, it is better to let Blender decide how to divide a shape's faces. Dividing a shape into n-gons and tris by hand can confuse blender.

One notable way to confuse Blender is to have a shape with a lot of triangles which could have been left as quads then, for instance, put a subsurface modifier on it. Blender won't be able to decide (calculate) which way the faces (normals) should be pointed and the model will seem to "fly apart" when the modifier is applied. If you deactivate the modifier, everything goes back to normal. Problems like this could occur with many of the "deform" or "generate" modifiers.

Generally, you are right. It is often best to avoid n-gons and tris in a model unless necessary or in a part of the model where it doesn't matter.

There are times, however, when you might need to insert an n-gon or divide quads into tris in order to make the model come out the way you want.

Bottom line: Best practice is to avoid using n-gons or triangles unless you need to.

[drownintention]

it's best to avoid n-gon and tris in a model unless necessarygeometry dash online