Using triangles on low poly models I see alot of low poly models using triangles on specific parts. I know this workflow can help reduce the amount of tris, and even help with joints deformations. But for some parts I’m not sure why triangles were even used, (like the shoulders of the examples posted down below). Is it supposed to reduce shading issues for stretched quads or something like that? Thanks for answering!
First of all, any model you create will be converted into triangles eventually by the game engine. Sometimes the engine makes a bad decision for which way it should triangulate the polygon. When it does, the texture stretches wrongly, also as a form itself may look broken. That's why on the extremely low poly models you may find some polygons triangulated by the modelers