Adding detail- Box modelling- Methods?

Support Basics & Interface
1

I’ve box modelled out my design, which is a truck, and now I want to add details to the mesh like cut out windows, and little trimmings and such.

From my time with 3D Studio Max I know the best method for the window wouldd be to use cut- Although, does cut (or an equivelent) exist for Blender?

Basicly I know 2 ways to add mesh detail- Subdivide, or a Boolean operation. To make a square window shape on the front of my truck by subdividing would make heaps of extra and annoying Polygons where I don’t want them.

Using a Boolean operation for the window would be fine, except Boolean Operations seem to create erratic polygons all over the place, making my woderfully organised mesh suddenly complicated- Or am I doing something wrong?

Also this window is on a corner, which means I carn’t just extrude and move the new polygons into place, because both the surfaces angles are different.

Anyone know how I could do this (preferably easily)?

2

You could try Stefano’s (S68) Knife script. I think you can download it from his website. This has similar ablities to Max’s cut tools.

Or for Booleans, try subdividing the area you want to cutout first, then use Booleans, this should reduce the amount of mess the Boolean calc makes of your nice mesh. EDIT oops just reread you post ignore this last bit. :expressionless: EDIT

Sonix.

3

Thanks sonix!

4

Asuming that you are familiar with (or are willing to find a good tutorial) the edit-mode tools of blender allow you to do all those things you mentioned without much hastle.

Need to cut off a window? Is there already a molding or edges around that window?

Yes -> select that molding, Split (Y), Separate §.
No -> Select the next best thing, place the cursor where the center of the window should be, extrude (E) and press Enter inmediatly (so the vertex don’t move), Scale toward the Cursor (press the . on your keyboard, then S)… all this to create the molding and from here do as in the ‘yes’ case :slight_smile:

If you ever need to sub-divide, make shure you activate the option for ‘Beauty Sub-Divide’ first and aply it on a local area at a time, not to the entire mesh. It is less messy this way and produce a cleaner looking mesh.

ALL THIS is intended to be done while on edit mode. Shoud you get a unexpected outcome, press U to undo your changes before you leve edit-mode… if you left edit-mode there is no way back, the changes are permanent.

5

I’m Sorry for not been more extensive on the explanation. But the edit-mode tools are just so many and with so many uses that I would need to, at least, see a wireframe of your model so I can give more specific advice.

Just to give you an overview off those tools are:

Basic ‘Pure’ Tools:
Extrude (E)
Scale (S)
Grab (G)
Rotate ®
Shear (Ctrl-S)
Wrap/Bend (Shif-W)
Blow
Smooth
Shrink/Fatten (Alt-S)
Split (Y)
Separate §
Make Face/Edge (F)
Make Vertex
Triangulate (Ctrl-T)

  • Rotate Edjes/Links (Ctrl-F)

  • Quadrangulate (Shif-J)

  • Special care is needed when using those.

Not ‘Pure’ Tools:
Fill and Sub-Divide… more on that later.

About the ‘pure’ tools, most of them don’t only have a normal lineal mode, but also a proportional (magnetic) mode, and there are 2 types of magnetic attraction.

To complicate things a little, almost all of them, besides the lineal/proportional thing, there are 4 global modifiers of the tool’s behavior, namely: ‘around boundbox center’, ‘around mediant point’, ‘around the cursor’ and ‘around individual center’… all 4 yielding very different results.

Note: Wrap and Blow allways operate ‘around the cursor’ while Shrink/Fatten is never influenced by those modifiers (I think so).

The ‘un-pure’ tools: Personally, I consider Fill and Subdive to be ‘unrefined’ tools because, 99% of the times that you use them you need to use other tools just to fix the result that they produce.

Fill (Shif-F) usually needs to be followed by a Beauty Fill (Alt-F), plus one or more Triangulate, Quadrangulate and Rotate Edges (that are dangerous by themself) just to get an nearly usefull mesh.

Sub-Divide, while been better behaved than Fill, also usually needs a lot of fixing & cleaning on the borders of sub-divided area.

Sub-Divide comes in plain, ‘Beauty’, ‘Fractal’ and ‘Smooth’ flavors, from those the ‘Beauty’ is my favorite because it does a great effort to only cut the faces along just one axis and produce nice quads, so you end with less mess to clean up later.

Feelling dizzy already? :frowning: Wait untill you read the release notes of Blender 2.28… there are many new hotkeys and variations to the tools already present… God, we need an updated documentation ASAP!!!