MODELLING CONCEPTS

Mega-poles.

Not an industry term but this is what I have taken to calling them!

Any vertex with more than 6 edges connected to it is a mega-pole.

They normally involve triangles and are to be avoided. They will always cause unwanted distortion in your renders when the subdivision surface modifier is required.

They can be fixed to an extent, in the eyes of the rendering engines, by altering the normal calculations in the area they affect, but as I mentioned earlier in the section concerning normals, this breaks the model and it is is no longer considered portable in a CG pipeline. You can see me demonstrating this when we Fix the UV sphere for use as a sub-D model.

Mega-pole. (More then six edges attached to a single vertex)