So I’m trying to make some kind of ‘meter box’; a few dials and gizmos set into a box that has pipes coming into and out of it. This is supposed to be a deco mesh for UT2004, so it’ll have to be raw triangles with a UV map in the end and low-poly-ish, which shouldn’t really be a problem. (Drools at render-baking . . .)
Anyway, I made this by adding points and faces to a standard plane. Once I got the outline I ended up deleting all the faces and remaking them myself to look less broken. Extruded the whole thing, subdivided the middle square 2-3 times, and in-truded some of the grid faces to make the rectangular indents; re-arranged some verts and did the same for the round ones.
Still, I’m feeling that I’m doing this the hard way or otherwise missing something, and I’m having a lot easier time with more organic modeling than this. Maybe I’m just too used to thinking about BSP editing, and I’m looking at this surface and going “Gack! Too many cuts!” And there are too many polys there, since I can combine a bunch of verts without changing anything (I did a few at the top above the indents there already; I did more later and then immediately froze it up by trying to render with a disp texture, apparantly …).
I’m just wondering if there’s a better way to make a shape like this from the beginning.
Also, how the heck do you get fill polys to work? I made it work once when I was still working on a dissected plane, but if i, say, delete all the (theoretically) coplanar faces making up the front surface of this thing, and then select all the verts that make up the border of that area, fill does . . . nothing.
. . . Now that I’m looking at it in the thumbnail preview on the boards, it looks like some kind of alien electric socket . . .
my, we are gluttons for punishment this fine Saturday, aren’t we? Well, given there are 87,359 ways to model a meter box, I will comment on a way different than yours, namely, number 84,342. And that is…indenting the dials was your downfall. By the way, Meter Box Approach (MBA)