The best “Modeling Best Practice” is to learn from your mistakes.
Serious.
So much of modeling is making mistakes and then not doing it again, especially cause of all the extra work it means doing.
So make mistakes…and make them a lot…but fix them as soon as you realize it is a mistake.
Save incrementally. A lot.
If you go to far then that’s ok…step back and start over.
Use google. As much as I hate mentioning the competition, something like “modeling theory” is program agnostic…there is so much good stuff floating around on the web that a simple search so something like, “mechanical modeling”, will produce tons of results, you have to sift a bit but it is there.
Now some of the key things I think you need to keep constant mental track of when modeling are:
Selections - an errant selection can throw off your whole game. That means keeping note of the “select visible only” checkboxes and the state they are in for each tool.
Tool options - pretty much anything that has a “visible only” checkbox needs your attention, as this could lead to unwanted changes, caps lead to your trouble, and “create ngon” checkboxes are also good to look out for.
Pretty much anytime you have a tool that is going to affect your geometry you want to do a quick check of all tool settings and make sure you are not going to produce something unexpected.
As far as rules to follow for creating valid geometry, you pretty much came across the biggest one.
But in general, you don’t want overlapping anything, these are going to cause shading artifacts and more.
You don’t want really skinny polygons…especially triangles.
You don’t want ngons on a curved surface, or on anything that will deform.
Triangles don’t deform as well as quads.
Try not to have a point connected to more than 5-6 edges.
Umm there is always more…but it is not coming to me at the moment.
