I watched a timelapse of a guy using 3ds max and noticed a tool he used that added what was like a loopcut but not all the way round, for example say you have a cube and add a cut down the middle it goes all the way round the square, but say i wanted to just add a loop cut to the middle of one face, How could i go about this?
I basically want to know if blender has an equivalent tool because its something i thought of before where I’ve created some bad models full of unnecessary vertex all over the place.
I don’t know if it’s what you are looking for, but by example, i want to cut only those 2 faces in the middle and vertically :
I just select those 3 edges of it then
And press the Subdivide button and those 2 faces are cut :
The appearence of triangles in faces close to the ones that are cut is obviously unavoidable unless you use a Bmesh build that add ngon support (or wait until the 2.63 release that will include it officially) as current Blender does not support more than triangles and quads faces
Knife tool does a similar job. Here I am cutting through in a straight line, though it can also cut to trace through & around corners (in top left of a face, out middle right).
I see, i figured this would be something to hope for in bmesh , i was meaning to do it without creating triangles, is this only possible with n-gons? thanks for the hasty replys and apologies for how long my own reply took , busy with blender! happy new year all!
If you do two of those cuts side by side, you can merge the resulting triangles pair-wise to produce quads, leaving a pair of 3-poles to go with the pair of 5-poles you added.
If you avoid non-quads and higher-order poles, then 3-poles and 5-poles are always created and destroyed in pairs.
Blender allows you to select a single edge and change its rotation clockwise / counter clockwise to assist with edge flow planning. In the earlier examples (from Robsoie and my own) you ended up with essentially an odd number of triangles at each end, meaning that just rotating edges around would never suffice and you’d have to make decisions about which edges you wanted to add/ delete in order to maintain a fully quad mesh. This where computer automation ends and decisions from the skilled artist are needed. The 3DS Max version you were looking to earlier would have itsel been using Ngons.
For what it’s worth, 3ds Max is still creating the triangles, it just doesn’t display them. In the image I have attached, I selected and unhid the invisible edges on the right.
If you took that mesh and deformed it at all, whether or not those triangles were visible, the distortion would be really bad because of the underlying structure.
@rcpongo , Is this the difference between what you see in the viewport and the actual mesh? sorry if i’m not grasping this, these concepts are all new to me.
yes,… the actual mesh is always made of triangles when it comes time to render.
The benefit to modeling with n-gons like this is that you can still do loop selects or edge ring selects while modeling. (for example on the faces around the outside.) If those are triangulated, it would break the loop/ring.
I was simply pointing out that the underlying geometry is still messed up though. When working with n-gons it is still essential to break things down into quads/tris for the best results.
