Modelling at the Speed of Light
I always thought that professional 3D artists invariably modelled exclusively with Sub-Ds. The Pros deliver clean, all-quad models with perfect topology.
Then I watched a Tor Frick stream, and realised how wrong I was.
He didn't care about topology at all.
Sure, he sometimes used subdivision surfaces in his models, but only when it was expedient.
Otherwise, he would kitbash away, making complex shapes out of simple primitives using booleans.
And by god, he was fast.
That's when I realised that the conventional wisdom was wrong. There are times when boolean modelling is not just acceptable, it's optimal.
The only issue is the shading artefacts. Cleaning them up can be a pain.
So I set about researching all the ways they could be fixed, without using any third-party add-ons. It turns out that in most cases they can be dealt with, especially with Blender's smart Auto-Smoothing. And when that fails, other options exist, such as transferring the normals from a clean mesh.
These tricks make boolean modelling perfectly viable, even in professional contexts. That doesn't mean booleans can replace subdivision surfaces in every situation - both methods have their place in your toolkit - but it does mean that knowing how to approach booleans can provide you with a huge productivity boost.
So if you want to model at the speed of light, knowing how to use booleans is the way. Find out more here.