Wrapping a surface around a mesh

Support Modeling
1

Hey folks,

I have scoured the web, the forums, the wikis, the books, and everything else I could get my hands on, with no luck. So I come here. I have a mesh that started as a UVSphere and is now a sort of egg-shaped ellipsoid sort of thing. Now I’m trying to create what will end up looking like decals, but made of different material and texture. I also want them to have thickness, so regular UV texture mapping is less than ideal. I want to make surface objects that precisely follow the contour of my egg mesh. I tried one approach, but it didn’t work as well as I’d hoped.

First, I made my “decal” object a bezier curve, and I extruded it out like a cookie cutter. I positioned it where I wanted so that the cookie cutter intersected the mesh at the exact spot where the decal would be. Then I did a Boolean Intersect function, and I got an object that was flat on one side, and properly contoured on the other. Then I grabbed the flat vertices, deleted them, and I got the contoured decal. My problem with this, however, is that I’m getting a lot of artifacts due to the large number of thin triangular faces on the decal object. I tried recalculating normals and removing doubles, but it didn’t work. Also, the overall decal object looks like it’s got some subtle creases where the grid lines of the UV sphere were.

I can post some image samples if it will help. Has anyone else had to do this? Basically, I just want to be able to make a surface that precisely matches the contour of part of a mesh so that I can place it there and give it different material, or even animate it separately if I want to.

Thanks,
Steve

2

Use Retopo to create surface “decals” objects that are separate from the main mesh.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Retopo

Pappy

3

Thanks! That’s exactly what I was looking for. Turns out I can’t use the curve object I was working on as the decal, but I can extrusion-model a plane that approximates it.

4

you can convert your curve to a mesh! :slight_smile:

5

I tried doing that. The problem is that the way it converted my curve to a mesh, the face of the curve was made of long and very thin faces whose vertices were only on the edges of the curve. When I applied retopo, it didn’t work because it couldn’t bend the mesh in the y-axis.

Is there a way that I can create a curve-to-mesh object that will be more flexible?

6

You can also just select some faces, the one where you want the decal, and extrude them out a hair. For the depth.

You could also, duplicate some of the planes where you want to place the decals. It will match perfectly.

Also you can get 3d with images. And it is usually less resource intensive. It depends on what you are using the model for.

7

Im guessing that you extruded a curve? Well if you dont extrude the curve, turn it into a mesh then extrude. Then the mesh will probably be alot more tidier.

8

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Map_Input#Position_a_Decal_on_a_Mesh