What's the difference between these two meshes? One has profile edges the other does not

I’ve been updating an old model of mine and I’m not sure what I did to the mesh to make it have some edges more prominent than others. There are no modifiers.


The meshes are shown with the Wire displayed but not “Draw All Edges” and the one on the left is showing all edges because there is something different between them. The shading on the one on the right is different too.

Here is the .blend file.

The object display properties. Enable ‘Draw All Edges’ option
https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/editors/3dview/object/properties/display.html

Did you read my post? It says there is not “Draw All Edges” displayed. The display properties are the same.

Apply scale (Ctrl+A)

That changed the shading but the wires remained the same.

Okay so how did I get there? What was done to the mesh to make some edges disappear? It was in the scaling??

Look at the Z scale before and after. Most likely it will be from the type of object you started with

After I saw Richard_Marklew’s post, I tried this: Select Plane.005 and do ctrl + a > Scale, add a Triangulate modifier to it. Apply it, then go into edit mode. Select everything in Plane.005, then go to Mesh > Faces > Tris to Quads. Then Mesh > Clean up > Limited Dissolve. That makes the edges match Cube.

Before doing the above, I was trying different things with the model. I wasn’t sure why the shading was different on the Plane.005 mesh, so I thought it might be because it was made with a plane instead of a cube like Cube seems to be. Without using the above method, I only went into edit mode for Plane.005 and tried to do Mesh > Clean Up > Limited Dissolve and the top of the building got really messed up. If I do the same for Cube, nothing is changed and it looks the same.

I’m not sure if it’s because some vertex isn’t welded correctly or something. One thing I did see was that you have a lot of reversed faces, which might be causing graphical problems in some way/how blender is showing your mesh. I’m not sure if you were planning on reversing those later, but good modeling habits are to clean those up right away before it gets unruly.

I even tried exporting the mesh to SketchUp and using a solid model analyzing tool to see what went wrong. The only thing it said was that the reversed faces needed to be fixed (there were a lot–64). If a model is in bad shape it usually says something like there are stray edges or the mesh isn’t actually solid, but it didn’t. That’s why I’m not sure what exactly went wrong with the top half of Plane.005. Sorry that I couldn’t figure it out.

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Thanks for that detailed response! I have a heck of a time telling if my faces are reversed or not. I’ll try to improve on that, thanks.

i useually work with my models with auto smooth, it works nicly with 30 degree set
image

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My mesh isn’t showing a difference when I use that.

Check for in edit mode there could me marked edges for sharp, just select all press ctrl e and select clear sharp

You also have to enable smooth shading to make auto smooth work.

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