I am new to Blender and am currently working on the model of a chinese lamp (picture of lamp included as attachment).
Currently I’m busy with the wooden frame that’s supposed to give the lamp a chinese look and the solid frame looks good, I find (see lamp_solid.jpg).
But the wireframe (lamp_wireframe.jpg) is ugly. Is it normal to have that many edges in a mesh or is there a more cleaner way to do it?
I have tried booleans but my mesh, as it seems, is not a closed mesh so I couldn’t do a boolean to obtain the frame so I had to resort to creating every face myself (thank god for the F-key :D).
Ah that got my interest, it reminded me of a photo I took at changdukgong palace in Seoul :). Anyway for a start, it might end up being more manageable if instead of bringing all those corner edges, you continued the loop through, in a grid-like arrangement. This took me about 2 minutes, and would be much easier to manipulate with loops select etc. I also used the mirror modifier here to save half the work!
There are also a heck of a lot of vertices for the curve at the top, maybe experiment how you can improve that by only subdividing and sub-subdividing locally, keeping a similar grid pattern.
You have to subdivide all the radians or meridians until you complete the circumference of your model or until you come to an edge that has only one face associated with it. This is easy to do by selecting a face loop with the alt+right click function, switching to edge select mode and deleting the edge loops that you dont want to subdivide, then subdividing the remainder. Of course if you aren’t going to subsurf your mesh, which is inappropriate in this case , then triangles really don’t matter. If you really need to delete tris you can join them with Shift+J as long as they don’t form an inverted quad (light blue and black tris), otherwise you’ll have to delete edges and refill quads one at at time
To be quite honest, I did not understand much of what you said.
I’m a beginner, so could you clarify what radians and meridians are in Blender? What is a face loop? I’ve heard about those, but what is a face loop? I’d be glad if someone could tell me.
Thanks for your reply, anyway, RamboBaby!
EDIT
I now have something looking clean without too many triangles.
Just took two halve circles and merged the verts until I had what I want.
Now the rest of the model and texturing
Jeez I’m a noob… this is taking waaaaaaaaaay too long…
You did a very good job but you have a lot of unnesecary verts. This will become obvious to you later on when you start working with subsurfed meshes but you’re fine for now. Here’s another image to clarify my previous post. As far as taking too long, you’ll keep creating more complex models as your skills improve and these will take even longer to produce. I have models that I have spent at least 100 hours creating and they’re not so great, but I’m getting better all the time and so will you. The globe on the right shows how localized subdivision is accomplished w/o creating tri’s.
I found this out when I tried to subsurf a gap that I filled by pressing f. So many creases… Same thing happens when you convert a curve into mesh. Blergh.
