Hi, I’m modelling a jar, and I want to join the base mesh to a relief I made.
Boolean modifier works fine but the resulting mesh doesn’t look right. Can you share any tip about this? Is there any way to do it with booleans, or should i join them manually. If the latter, any workflow tips?
Thanks!
I think your geometry is correct and u have Shading: smooth on. Change shading to Flat and u’ll see the real geometry. Try also Limited dissolve and lower the value near zero, that dissolves unnecessary vertices.
Netich, what Boolean usually produces can be described as “bad, bad topology”, and yours is the case. It has lots of triangles and vertices with more than four incident edges. Standard algorithms can’t compute loops through it, therefore can’t smooth it without artifacts. The best way would be to use one of many ways to retopologize this into a quad-dominant mesh, but if you are not going to modify your mesh further, you can use Edge Split modifier. Won’t help on a curved surface, though. Then, only retopo.
Something you could also note is that not all geometry has to be connected. ‘floating geometry’ works perfectly in most cases. if you’re just planning on a normal scene with this jar without any complicated rig or brake-simulations planned out you could just place the relief where it need to be, press contrl+J to join the objects, and leave the ‘joining the geometry’ part out all together.
You might also want to consider baking the relief’s geometry onto the normals of the jar.
If you’re really set on joining the geometry itself I fear there is gonna be a lot of manual cleaning or total retopo involved.
Hope this helps!
P.s. I really love the design XD but that’s an artistic comment on the project itself haha.
Good luck,
Ristridyn
Thats the problem, I want this relief to to be smoth over the jar, like its the same material. I wouldn’t mind if there are triangles as it is a static piece, as long as it renders ok, but it doesn’t.
So joining it manually is my only option, I guess. But should I use quad diamonds to decrease the vertices from the relief to the base mesh?
PD: glad you like it, Ristridyn. Here it is rendered:
You may not mind the triangles, but Smooth Shading and Subsurf always do.
Personally, I don’t see why you would need to join geometries, as none of them is raytraced glass. A renderer doesn’t care about polygons, its normals it sees. You can move the edge of your relief into the jar’s wall a little, to aviod photon mapping artifacts.
Another way is to make your relief a normal map or a displacement map. First one would decrease the polycount as well.
Or you can try to retopo Shrinkwrap’ping a cube around your Boolean union and cutting a lot of loops through said cube, which generally is more poly-efficient than displacing a highly subdivided mesh. Or Remesh it. Or…
And if everything fails, then you can begin manually creating and connecting vertices.
By the way, what engine do you use? The result looks fantastic.
Looking good Netich, as far as I can see you wouldn’t need to join the geometry for this scene… in fact I think that uv-unwrapping your jar and mapping the relief onto it would be the most efficient way to go, and I do not think you will see the difference between this relief being mapped with materials or build with geometry. way to go! 
I guess so, maybe I’ll bake the normals, too. But as this was just a practice, I wanted to learn how I could do it. But doing it manually is too much work just to practice…
Thanks guys!
