I’ve been doing blender now for about 6 months. I’m obviously no pro, but my models are decent (better ones will come with experience).
That was the back story (lol), my question is about “edge loop flow”
Why is it when I make a model it doesn’t have any flow? Everything comes out blocky. When I see you guys posting your work, I notice the edge loops right away and I can see the flow to it. My mesh never looks like that, more often than not my edge loops (if you can call them that) end up looking jagged, besides on faces…I’m really good at faces.
Don’t get me wrong, then end result is what’s important to me, and everything I model is passable in my eyes (again noob), I just wanna be sure I’m learning the right way. I’ve read up as much as I can on topology and poles, but I just don’t seem to be getting it…least not in a way I’m content with.
What is it I’m doing or not doing? Anything you can think of I should read or watch?
Would you mind sharing one of those meshes you are the least satisfied with and point out why? Just throwing general advice in the air will probably be redundant if you already read all there was to read.
File>Dump Subwindow to capture the 3D view and here load it from your hard drive as an attachment here (only when this editor is in advanced mode).
Best if you show the wire over the Solid shading. This can be done in the Object buttons, object sub-context, Draw panel, Wire button.
Where does it save to when I do the following?
File>Dump Subwindow to capture the 3D view and here load it from your hard drive as an attachment here (only when this editor is in advanced mode).
And when I follow this path:
Object buttons, object sub-context, Draw panel, Wire button.
I have no object sub-context…but I do have a draw panel with layers, drawtype, and draw extra. When I click on wire under drawtype it puts a dense wireframe around it…if this is what you guys post it looks clean, but dense. If that is what you guys are doing (or a form of it), well then I’m in decent shape. But if not, then I’m confused.
What I’m talking about (maybe I explained it wrong) is like when I’m in edit mode.
It depends on your OS but if it is windows usually C: mp … though you can set the file path to any where you want … go to the Scene context (F10) of the Buttons Window and select the directory/file path you want to save your file to (like the desktop) .
If you are dumping the subwindow in Edit Mode you should get a wireframe image like you are wanting .
The draw types in Object Mode won’t produce a good solid wire image to look at as with the wireframe draw type you can see through the faces .
The dense wireframe mesh can be gotten rid of though by hitting the “Optimal Draw” button on the Subsurf Modifier . But even that isn’t a good image to look at if you want to look at edgeloops .
Just dumping the subwindow in Edit Mode is the easiest option, but if you want to see the wire in Object Mode (useful for figuring out how the mesh is deforming when animating as well), select the object and go to the Object context (F7) in the Buttons Window and go to the Draw panel . Leave the Drawtype to Shaded and in the buttons below Draw Extra hit “Wire”. Now in you have the “Optimal Draw” selected in the Subsurf modifier you will see the wire you see in Edit Mode … though sometimes some edges don’t get drawn it’s good enough for looking at wires .
Where does it save to when I do the following?
File>Dump Subwindow to capture the 3D view and here load it from your hard drive as an attachment here (only when this editor is in advanced mode).
This is the correct terminology, because in the Object Context (or you can call it Object Buttons) there is both an Object Subcontext (the one it goes to by default, and the one you used), and a physics subcontext. In SVN there is also a particles subcontext.
KK I think I got it…maybe not…but let me know either way.
Anyway, this is a work in progress that you can easily see my problem in, most my others are super detailed. My issue is, I believe up until now I’ve only done what was necessary to get the desired result. I want to do it the correct way and still get the desired result lol. If that makes it any clearer for you guys lol.
Not the greatest mesh (like I said), but with a little more work at least the finished result will be a decent hand lol. But it shows perfectly my missing “flow” lol
I think I just may need a bit more IN DEPTH coverage, because for all the reading and rereading I do of the online material…it just doesn’t smack me in the back of the head and say, “Stupid, do it this way because…”, at least not for me.
So I started looking around to find books that I think may help. If some of you guys have read/seen these books let me know what your gut reaction to them was. I should state here I’m going to need the opinions of someone with a higher skill lvl than mine lol. I’m not shooting down any opinions here, so if you have one share. I just don’t want 5 people that have been “blending” for 6 mos or less telling me its the best blender book they’ve read…I’d rather have 1 artist that’s been blending for years tell me it sucks than that.
I’ve been able to correct my issue. Now that I think about it it was never really an issue. I’m actually surprised noone caught it, but I do believ thats becasue only 3 of you bothered to reply.
If you look at my screen dumps, youll see that 1-the mesh looks blocky, and 2-there is a setting that would solve my “issue” that isn’t checked. Not sure what its called, but if you check in the subsurf modifier settings in the screen shot up above (the one with the modifier buttons shown), you’ll see that to the right of the name of the modifier there is an x (to close) and 3 circles, a down arrow, an up arrow and an empty circle to the left of the up arrow. That empty circle when clicked puts up 3 verts in the form of a triangle. Once I clicked this I was able to “convert” all of my horrible meshes into nice flowing meshes with a bit of tweaking.
Thanks for all that tried to help. Issue has been resolved. I still would like feedback on these two books as I should get them either today or tomorrow.
Meh, set smooth didn’t really do much for me except change the “look” of the finished model. Smooth itself helped sometimes, but to many smooths screwed the model. The thing that fixed my issue was reading about someone esle’s problems with thier topology, someone mentioned the editing cage, so I searched thru the manual for it and found this:
Activating this took the “boxy” mesh of my hand and turned it into the nice flowing mesh I was talking about, and always envious of. Actually, I tried this first with modeling a head with no ref’s, and produced a quick “form” mesh better than I could do with a ref!
My topology was always there. I incorrectly understood my issue to be with topology because of the mesh looking “boxy”. So I thought there was something wrong with it as it didn’t “flow” like the other meshes I’ve seen here. Soon as I hit this button (with some minor tweaking) I INSTANTLY saw those loops that I’d have to strain my eyes finding previously.
