The Lost Work Thread (formerly 40 mins work...)

As I asked in another thread…what is alt + J?

With alt+J blender tries to combine triangular faces to a quad faces.
This reduces at least the amount of edges and in combination with skilfull subdivison (this normally produces triangular faces) you can nearly completely avoid triangular faces which is important for subsurface modeling.

http://molblend.gmxhome.de/subdivide.jpg

I’m not yet sure if I’m going to subsurface this one, but that’s pretty clever and I couldn’t find it documented in any of the hotkey lists I found. Is it new to 2.27 or one of the more recent builds? I guess the biggest reason right now that I’m trying to avoid triangles is that I’ve come this far without using a single one and I’m hoping to stick to it. Hopefully the results will be worth the effort!

And what about these quads that can’t possibly be rendered with a flat face? These “hourglass” shaped ones…should I cut them into triangles or just see what happens when I stick a face on it and render it?

For a normal mesh set to smooth it does essentially make no difference if you have triangular faces or not. If your triangles are coplanare this holds true for the solid mode. AFAIK, while redering quad faces are split in triangular faces anyway.
Therefor avioding triangular faces just looks less crowded and therefor in complex meshes helps to keep the overview.

For subsurface modeling triangular faces can cause ugly parts but not allways (depends on the surrounding). Because it is hard to predict if or if not there will be a “fault” in the subsurfaces one tries to avoid triangular faces.

Having all quad faces should technically reduce the number of verts by quite a bit right? I’m still going pretty good on it. I’m adding smaller and smaller details to my mesh. Texturing it will be a pain in butt.

it would reduce the number of faces, probably not the number of verts.

d52477001

Well I’m thinking…if you take a model and make it out of big blocks (ie quads) than you’ll have some number of vertices. Since triangles are smaller you’d need more blocks correct? Thus more vertices? Or is this thought inherently flawed?

Think of a square made out of quads and triangles:

*----*  *----*
|    |  |   /|
|    |  |  / |
|    |  | /  |
|    |  |/   |
*----*  *----*

The one made out of quads has the same number of verticies as the one made out of triangles, even though it has half the number of faces - the triangles share verticies.

The same is true for any shape - converting triangles to quads only reduces the number of faces, but leaves the verticies alone.

Blender actually finds which triangles to merge into quads by finding 2 (coplanar) triangles that share an edge, hence sharing 2 verticies, hence having 4 verticies between them, to convert to a quad which uses all 4 of those verticies. (it’s obviously more compicated than that, but that’s the idea beind it)

What about a situation like this:


*----*----*
*   / \   *
*  /   \  *
* /     \ *
*/       \*
*---------*

And that kind of thing is often the result of subdivision.

Damn, one thing just happened with me…
I was working with photoshop and wanted to save…
I usually save with shift+W in Blender, but in photoshop it closes…
I forgot that, so I pressed Shift+W in photoshop when I was finaly done
and it wanted to close my work and asked me do I want to save.
there was Yes No Close sign but I thought that it asked that do I want to
close my work and I pressed ‘no’… but it really asked to I want to save my work so… Damn

I wish someone could decide on a grammar standard for dialog boxes and confirmations.

Photoshop might say:
Are you sure you want to close without saving?

And the yes and no boxes could be in the opposite places as usual. Another program might say:

Are you sure you want to save without closing?

And there might not be any yes button at all… Just No and Cancel. What the hell?

True, that could result in a decrease in the number of verticies, but Ctrl+J won’t do that for this reason:
Consider this shape:

*----*----*
|    |    |
|A   |B   |C
*----*----*
|   / \   |
|  /   \  |
| /     \ |
|/       \|
*---------*

(verticies named for convenieance)

If I replaced it with:

*----*----*
|    |    |
|A   |B   |C
*----*----*
|         |
|         |
|         |
|         |
*---------*

then the lower square does not use the vertex B, just A and C.
This means that the lower square is not connected to the 2 higher squares, which in turn will affect subsurfs and set smooth because they are seperate.

xintoc:
Yes, I noticed that.
Word says: “Do you want to save before closing? (yes/no/cancel)” Yes = Save, No = Don’t Save, Cancel = Don’t Quit
Another program I use often says: “Document not saved. Really quit? (yes/no)” Yes = Don’t Save, No = Don’t Quit
The Yes button is totally different

They should make the standard: “Document not saved. (Save/Don’t Save/Cancel)” so no-one can get confused.