N-gon
Polygon with 5+ sides
Definition
An n-gon is a polygon with five or more sides, generally avoided in production meshes. N-gons triangulate unpredictably (the engine chooses which diagonals to use), can cause shading artefacts, and break edge-loop flow needed for animation. Some n-gons are acceptable in flat, undeformed areas of hard-surface props; never in deforming character geometry.
In production
An n-gon shows up constantly in Boolean output, ZRemesher edge cases, and lazy quad-merges, and every major DCC flags it differently — Blender's Statistics overlay counts n-gons directly, while Maya's Mesh > Cleanup tool hunts them down by face-side count. The real danger surfaces at bake time: an n-gon that looked flat in the viewport can catch a stray triangulation diagonal that creates a visible crease under a normal map bake in Substance Painter or Marmoset Toolbag, especially across curved surfaces like a car hood or helmet dome. Riot and Blizzard character pipelines enforce strict quad-only topology before a mesh is allowed into rigging, because Maya's smooth-bind algorithm calculates weights per-quad and an n-gon can silently skip a vertex from receiving proper influence. The accepted exception is a flat, non-deforming face — the underside of a crate, the interior of a pipe cap — where no subdivision or deformation will ever reveal the arbitrary triangulation.
