Hi Charles,
This is not so much about it being all Quads (that'll probably be more out of a force of habit, albeit not a bad one), as to get more Face Corners to tell Blender what part of the image comes where on the Geometry. This to prevent too much warping of the texture (photo). Chris points this out in the Introduction to Camera Projection Lesson from ~7:20:
I've heard the best car mechanics are the ones that wear all white at the shop and at the end of the day, it has to remain all white. That is to say, perhaps as Martin says, force of habit apart from technical matters. Maybe excellence has to find you practicing even when it's not needed. That's how you get good. Like the best Ju-Jitsu guys train 7 days a week all year long, take no breaks even on holidays. It's crazy.
My issue is that it's teaching poor topology... If you don't know what you're doing you think that this is ok, while it also takes a lot longer than simply outlining (and getting as many corner faces as you need) and simply doing an ngon fill. I don't really get it... it seems like it's the worst of both worlds
Sure. It's a really creative course and I had no idea about UV projection mapping so I'm learning plenty and enjoying it.
It just seems to me that the overall point/concept of the course is that you CAN cheat, Ian Hubert style, and get really good results. I found it odd that the tutorial didn't lean into this 'lazy tutorial' style more. Or go the other way and use all these shapes to teach modelling and resolving edge flow in 2d (which is the best way to learn this stuff) and then extruding on the Z. They'd work a bit like JL's Cookie Logo in this respect except that you'd have loads of shapes to do on your own once you've been taught the right approach.
I found myself questioning whether I was missing something as I really don't know anything so that's why I asked the question.
Martin... is this not ok?
Well,
You might be able to get away with it in this case, where the parts are really small and it won't be very noticeable (unless you zoom in), but it will probably warp the texture badly, as with that Cube in Chris's example.
It's not the fact that it's an NGon, that is the problem.
The texture already seems to warp quite a lot which is why the edges get patched up and can't see/understand why it'll be worse this way. So I guess I'll try it like this for the next part I make and see if it works or not. Will update here