How To Self-Union a Mesh (text with screen captures)

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1

The question comes up every so often: How can you make a smooth topologically good mesh starting with a self-intersecting shape?

Finally, I have been motivated to write a how-to by a question from Kevin Tee. Here is his sketch showing the essence of the problem:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]311630[/ATTACH]

We want to start with an easily modeled low-poly shape, with hard corners and right angles, and end up with a smooth object with nicely joined intersections after applying a subsurface modifier, like this:

selfunBA.png834×438 19.3 KB

So here is how to perform this action. We’ll start with this mesh, made from a cube by extruding faces and scaling:


2

I hit a limit of three images per post. The images are not large, but there’s about fifteen of them. Now I’m trying to decide whether to write my little tutorial as a series of four or five posts here, or to go write an HTML file hosted elsewhere, and link to it. Posting here would be easier.

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Instead of attaching the images, you can use a free image hosting , something like Imgur that allow this
http://imgur.com/

Then copy paste the img url between img tag, by example this :
http://i.imgur.com/cVrw3Rx.jpg

is coming from copy pasting :
[ IMG]http://i.imgur.com/cVrw3Rx.jpg[/IMG]
(without the space between the [ and the I )

And so does not put a load on the Blenderartist server, as it’s not attached, allowing for more pictures in a post

4

I have written some HTML and put it with all the images on my personal website. No mysteries about where the funding comes from! This is just a static page. My “content management system” is ftp and a text editor :smiley:

Please see http://www.darenscotwilson.com/spec/selfunion/selfunion.html for the full story. Comments can go here in this BA thread.