Hello everyone, I am pretty new to the world of 3d modeling and this is my first attempt on making anything inorganic.
Typically I never had a problem with subdividing. However, when I began working on my tugboat today, I decided to see what it looked like when I subdivide it.
When I decided that perhaps I can fix it in sculpting, my brushes has little to no affect in many of the areas of the ship, which I thought was pretty weird.
I would really be thankful to anyone who can explain why this happened and perhaps a way to circumvent this.
Looks like you have some inverted normals (you can tell because they have a slightly different color). Recalculate them and it should look better.
(edit mode - shading/UV tab - Normals: Recalculate)
You have faces connected in a T shape somewhere; this is a big ‘no, no’ and Subsurf shows these immediately. You will not be able to recalculate normals automatically either.
Second, Subsurf really does ‘melt’ mesh - you can see this on a default Cube example in edit mode. To define shape you need to place several edge loops close to each other - try on Cube with Subsurf modifier, keys Ctrl-R in edit mode.
Always include an example .blend with support questions. You included the interface with the screenshots as one should, but they’re not a substitute for a .blend file.
Since there’s no file people can only guess and I’m guessing the object also has unapplied scale. Sculpting having no effect suggest that. So, in the following order: object mode, ctrl+A -> scale, edit mode, select all, W -> remove doubles, ctrl+N to make normals (face directions) consistent and pointing out.
As mentioned, if there are mesh errors, automatically calculating normals with ctrl+N might not work. Interior faces is a non-manifold mesh error that is sure to break normals recalculation. In other words, there are edges that have more than two faces connected to them, so some faces aren’t used for defining one continuous surface.
Everything gets smoothed so you need to add edge loops near the edges, at the top and bottom for every part. It also looks like you’ve got some internal faces or something.
Essentially you’ve defined the shape of the boat but not how it should retain its shape. Subdivision modifiers work by approximating a medium between two vertices and therefore smoothing them, the resultant mesh being more dense.
In plain man’s terms, the subsurf modifier doesn’t know which edges should be sharp and which one’s smooth. The way you combat this is by adding edge-loops and creasing, also know as supporting geometry. Read through the link above and get a better understanding of hard-surface geometry before attempting to model something such as this, not that you shouldn’t - just you’ll get frustrated with the results if you don’t understand what’s going on.
