I’m a novice modeller and I’ve been hitting a sort of a wall on a consistent basis when I try to model anything even slightly complex. Basically the polygon structure of my model deteriorates rapidly and all sorts of mini-polygons and very thin and long polygons appear.
An example of this occurred yesterday when I attempted to model a rifle; the handle ended up like this after I worked here and there on the whole model. The model is unfinished but the handle is pretty unworkable due to the polygon mess that emerged – pretty awful even for my untrained eye.
No part of it can be, say, scaled without those long thin triangles popping out of the mesh.
I’d like to hear comments from modellers more experienced about how I should try to “control” my mesh from the beginning. Should I critically audit every vertex and edge at every step and remove everything but the bare minimum? Or should I on the contrary apply an “if in doubt, subdivide; if it didn’t help, subdivide again” rule and stop worrying about polygon count? Should I use booleans as much as possible? Or never?
There are all sorts of “this is how you make a dolphin”, “this is how you make a tea cup” tutorials out there, but I haven’t really found a tutorial that speaks about the general principles governing modelling, or even tutorials giving hints on how to deal with specific problematic situations that might arise during the modelling process. If you can point me to one, I’ll be thankful.
Suppose there are no general rules for it. It strongly depends on the actual model, how detailed it should be, style, organic shape, mechanic shape etc.
Most important I think is planing before modeling, but this is something you’ll need some experiences.
Polycount should be as low as possible, because it’s reduces rendering time and as you have seen it can be hard to tweak a high poly model.
On the other side sometimes it’s more work to care for the polycount then not.
Booleans I’d use only as the very last step in modeling because usually you get a mess of vertices which are hard to handle. In addition, it’s nearly impossible to smooth (Set smooth) an object after a boolean operation, therefore it’s only usefull for solid objects.
As a rule of thumb, try to keep quad meshes because they are more easy to handle and help to keep the overview. For subsurface modeling quads are a must because tris faces give artefacts.
For small details think about if it’s worth to model them or to “fake” them with textures and bumpmaps.
For the subdivide thing I think the new knife tool is of great help.
First, I would suggest you hand-draw what you want to model. It does not matter whether you can sketch well or not but it helps you to visualize what you want and to plan the best way to model it.
In many cases, I will start with a basic primitive (like a cube) and begin extruding from one side to get a very basic, crude shape of the object. This also helps keep all of the polys as quads (which you need if you plan on subdividing or subsurfing). Once you have the basic shape, adjust the positions of the vertices to fine tune the shape. Either subdivide or use subsurfing to help smooth the shape.
I was in the same boat as you are now. For some, modelling comes naturally. Some people just see things different and are able to maintain an overall vision while working.
And some people are artists. It’s funny, but I’m amazed at how much being an artist matters in this medium. Once a guy asked on this forum if he should take computer programming classes or art classes to make him a good blenderhead. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of art classes.
The reason you don’t see any tutorials on basic modelling principles is because the ways in which you can model anything are so numerous that it comes down to a matter of taste.
After awhile the tools in blender will become second nature to use. For me this is when modelling became relaxing. Sometimes I just turn on blender and make silly things and tweak them then quit without saving. It’s fun. Texturing gives me a rash still.
My advice for making inaminate objects like the one you want is learn to use constraints in everything you do. Don’t move one vertex freely, don’t move a vertex if there’s a mirrored one that should be moving with it. Don’t scale without constraints, don’t do anything without constraints. This, however, is advice from a guy that can’t draw a circle to save his life. Using constraints keeps my head in order.
I’ve just started my second attempt to learn to Blender (encouraged by the new GUI), and for my little experience I say that just making a basic shape and extruding from there works best.
The only problem I have walked into sofar is that in solid view, the faces look weird near some edges of the face (a bit like a waving flag), although there are no interfering faces, only two faces sharing an edge (doesn’t seem too odd). Is this just a problem Blender has to draw the faces and will that be fixed when used in a game or am I doing something wrong?
Are they actually sharing the edge or are they 2 edge very close/on top of each other? If they’re 2 different meshes sharing the edge, just make one go inside the other a bit. If they’re the same mesh then join the vertexes on the shared edge by scaling down two vertexes at the same time to close to zero and remove doubles.
In my model everything is one mesh, and I’m sure they share edges, I can’t see any verticles very close to each other, and remove doubles gives no result (removed: 0).
okay, i totally understand where you’re coming from.
to do with your rifle:
delete it, and start again. trying to rescue a messy mesh is time consuming and you will never get as good a result as if you just start over.
learn where the straight edges of your model are, and use straight edges for them; ie just one plane. try to use the primitives (circle, cube, plane) as much as possible, and try to extrude faces, (two verts joined by an edge) rather than single verts.
stay away frob booleans, they are the devil!
good luck with your modelling, and persevere, blender is (IMHO) the best modelling engine there is…
My advice is to keep is simple and symetrical when possible. I made you a diagram to help with your rifle stock. Basic shape>>subdivide>>subsurface>>set smooth.
<edit> or if you prefer…
add circle>>constraint scale>>extrude,rotate,scale>>repeat>>shift-F to face, and use the warp tool for the subtle curvature on the end.
If you have hit ‘Set Smooth’ and you still have the problem then you have two options I can think of.
Subsurf will change the whole geometry of the mesh and raise the vert count unnecessarily, so…
You can select only the faces that are causing the problem and W-Subdivide Smooth once,
Go in there and manually tweak the offending verts
If neither of these work then make another model with a different approach. eg: start with an icosphere and delete most of it then extrude from there. Before extruding into a model duplicate the remaining ico a few times and make transitions that mimic the ones that wrinkled your problem mesh and see how they work. If they don’t, start again with a mesh with quads.
This is strange…
I’ve made a paralellepepid(sp) test object with those waving things.
1.) from camera view (0), the waves aren’t visible
2.) from a view just a little bit off the camera, they are there and big
3.) when rendered, they aren’t there again.
So do I have a problem or not? :-?
I’m really puzzled.
