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These are the vertices I'm trying to connect img1 )

And this is my best attempt at doing so without distorting the mesh too much img2

I still ended up with a triangle, and some awful geometry that made smoothing out the mesh a lot harder. Am I doing anything wrong? Is there a better way to do this?

I considered adding more edge loops on the left side, but I have subdivision surface modifier on, and adding more edge loops there sharpens the mesh too much.

Question

How do I fill in the hole while avoiding n-gons?

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  • $\begingroup$ I'm not sure what you are exactly trying to do, but it seems to me that you hole is flat. You can select all the edges from the border, right click and "new face from edges" if you want. $\endgroup$
    – elie520
    Mar 14, 2021 at 8:52
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    $\begingroup$ My guess is that the goal is to avoid ngons. $\endgroup$
    – R-800
    Mar 14, 2021 at 8:57
  • $\begingroup$ @elie520 I'm trying to avoid ngons $\endgroup$ Mar 14, 2021 at 9:01
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    $\begingroup$ Related: topologyguides.com/loop-reduction $\endgroup$ Mar 14, 2021 at 9:16
  • $\begingroup$ Avoiding triangles seems completely unnatural for me but you can always subdivide your shape into quads and eventually one triangle. If you have a remaining triangle, you can alway add a point on the perimeter to make it a quad. Or if you don't want aligned points, you add a point in the middle of the triangle, subdividing it into 3 quads. $\endgroup$
    – elie520
    Mar 14, 2021 at 9:23

2 Answers 2

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Your situation has an even amount of vertices. They cannot be connected with only quads. Each inserted quad will always add/subtract exactly 2 vertices to/from a hole and you will always end up with 3 vertices in the end.

After adding one more vert you can easily achieve quads for example like this:

Quads

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After looking at your file, I see that there is a lot of unnecessary geometry, meaning vertices and edges stretching across large planar areas which, in themselves, define no surface curvature. If efficiency is the goal, you will want to avoid accumulating large numbers of vertices and edges on flat surfaces. Remember that the purpose of the vertices and edges is to define shape. If there's no shape, there shouldn't be any vertices or edges either.

I believe this efficiency consideration is important to point out because, the very spot where you are struggling is precisely a place where you have a lot of edges on the "mane" side of your Knight model. Precisely because of all those edges, you are now in the difficult position of trying to find out how you can fill your hole without creating ngons. Perhaps it didn't seem obvious at first, but if you can't get rid of an ngon any other way, there is always the possibility of actually REMOVING geometry to solve the problem. Sometimes this is the best option.

Here's a cut down version of your file. You may not like the shape, but it should be pretty close to the shape you had. But it has a lot fewer polys where there was no shape defined. And so getting rid of the hole was easy. You may be able to apply a shrinkwrap modifier to get some of the lost shape back. Remember that not every visual contour needs to be modeled. Most of the ribbed texturing on the knight's mane will be able to be faked with texturing.

enter image description here

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