How do I get rid of the wrinkles at the top of my bowling pins?
More explanation: I added a cylinder, did several Loop Subdivides, selected the various loops and scaled them up or down, then grabbed the top loop, and scaled it to zero. I then added a subsurf modifier, and I’m getting the shown results.
I’ve checked surface normals, and they’re all pointing out, and I’ve removed doubles (there had been many, and were causing other problems). And in case it matters, when I duplicated the pins, I used Duplicate Linked, although I had the problem when it was just one pin.
And yes, I’m quite new to Blender and 3D art in general, so feel free to not overlook the really REALLY obvious, if you have any suggestions.
A cyclinder is composed of triangles at the top and the bottom, that could explain why the subsurf makes these wrinkles. You should start modeling from a cube, with a Subsurf at 3 and Set Smooth to have a nice rounded shape.
You should avoid triangles whenever possible. delete all the top triangular faces and try reconstructing the topology with quads, it shouldn´t be difficult.
So, delete the triangles, then select two opposing vertexes and hit ¨F¨, that will create a new edge connecting those vertexes. Then you can select the newly created edge, and hit ¨W¨ and the subdivide option. You can subdivide the edge by the number of faces that will cross it. Then start creating faces by selecting 4 vertexes and hitting ¨F¨, subdivide when necessary in order to avoid 3 vertexes faces. When you hit ¨W¨, there´s another option called merge, this option fuses 2 or more vertexes together, you´ll definitely need to use it if you are going to edit topology.
Thanks to both of you. I tried changing the triangles to quads, which helped quite a bit, although I still had some odd artifacts at the edges. But it’s good to know that triangles can be evil, at least with subsurfs.
I also tried making the pin w/cubes, and that worked well. Looks like using fewer verts/faces, and letting subsurf just do its thing, is a winner, especially for something simple like this.
One thing you need to think about is the amount of vertices/edges you need to produce a shape. In your exmple you definately have too dense a mesh. The shape is fairly simple and will need only a small amount of vertices. Then subsurfs will become a lot easier to deal with.
A cube is not the place to start, but something like an 8 vertice cylinder or circle is. You won’t get circular shapes with subsurfed cubes.
