Hi. I have a question about modeling technique, specifically box modeling or subd surface modeling. Suppose I have a nice big mesh that doesn’t have alot of detail, like a body. Then, I extrude an arm from one of the faces of the body mesh. Every time I add an edge loop on the arm, parallel to the direction the face was extruded from, I am adding unnecessary detail to the main body, and I end up with creases because of all the edges I’m adding to the body. Then, later, I extrude one of the faces of the arm to become a finger. Again, I make longitudinal edge loops to create detail in the finger. Again, this creates more and more edges and vertices on the body, which is quickly going from a nice mesh with only a few faces, to a big mess with alot of unnecessary edges caused by the details in the arms and subsequent fingers.
So, what am I doing wrong? How can I create detail without adding edgeloops and saturating my whole object with edges and vertices that aren’t even required in those places?
Sometimes you have to live with it, otherwise you’ll have to add triangles to merge adjacent edge loops, which will cause creases pretty easily, so I usually don’t do that unless the crease created by the triangle looks good.
To get rid of those creases that you speak of, I usually select that area and then press the smooth button, making the extra edges less visable.
Use the extruded loops of edges as edgeloops; it’s called tweaking. You go into edit mode and select the verts 1 by 1 and move them into the positions that the edgeloop would be when you cut it (if you’d cut it).
Some folks (like me) only ever build one humanoid. Once it’s built I copy it and tweak everything till it’s a completely different character. Admittedly this is easier in Wings3d than in Blender, but blender runs a pretty close second.
I find the multicut (in the cvs) very helpful in modelling veins and such.
Box modelling looks more intemidating than it is. I think your problem is that you use edge cut to much. Edgeloop cuts is helpful in the begining to make a nice base model and later to add rimples, and more detail around the nose or eyes and such. But let say you want to model the muscles that run criss cross over the body, then you realy have to use the knife tool. Use the knife to make those cuts along the flow of the edgloops, muscle fiber direction. Most of the time you’ll end up with ugly triangles at the begining and end of the cut. Use here Alt+j to merge triangles into quads, use spin edge to correct the flow of the loops. If you get a strange geometry when spinning an edge, that means that you have 2 quads that are share 2 edges, thus making them look like strange triangles. You should correct this.
Use merge vertex to control the detail and edgeloops too.
If at some point it is difficult to cut a topology in your model, just delete some faces where the refinement should happen and build the detail there poly by poly then connect it somehow to your best judgement to the model. Then keep cleaning up unnecesary edgeloops and triangles etc etc etc.
Thanks alot for all the replies, I’m definitely learning alot. I’m going to try to put into practise what has been mentioned. What would be great would be if someone very knowledgeable made a tutorial for adding the details to a model, after the initial edge looping is complete <wink> <wink> <nudge> <nudge>
But seriously, the info you guys provided is great. I’m going to try to use the cut tool alot more, and use the existing loops that I have.
What would be great would be if someone very knowledgeable made a tutorial for adding the details to a model, after the initial edge looping is complete
Very relaxing site (if you don’t need it now you will later):
and see Modron’s sig for modelling a wink wink and a nudge nudge.
Again, I would just like to say thanks for all your suggestions and links. I do have a related questions though. In the following picture, do you think that this model is all one mesh, and that all the little details have been extruded out? Or, is there a base model, and then all the little details are modelled separately and then just “set” onto the main mesh? This picture is exactly the kind of thing that I would love to be able to do:
You mean: is it one object?
Yes it is one object.
Is it made from one mesh?
No, during the modeling, you keep adding different mesh objects to the object.
For organic modeling, almost always it is truly one mesh from beginning to end.
