Discover the intricacies of creating complex geometries in digital models, focusing on the importance of clean lines and avoiding overlaps when extruding objects. The information also includes tips on softening or hiding edges to clean up a model.
Key Insights
- The article discusses the creation of complex geometry models, emphasizing the need for meticulous drawing and extruding to avoid unnecessary overlaps and jagged lines. The effects of these mistakes are clearly visible when extruding objects.
- Cleaning up models is a crucial part of the process, and this can be achieved through softening the edges or physically hiding them. The article provides detailed instructions on how to use the 'soften edges' slider and other tools to achieve a cleaner, more professional look in the model.
- The article underscores the importance of using the freehand tool effectively, highlighting that careful attention to lines and edges ensures a smooth and well-structured model. It demonstrates the difference in quality between models drawn with precise control points and those drawn without such careful attention.
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So in this next video, we are going to talk about creating a koi fish and applying materials to our koi fish using projected materials. But first, before we begin with the koi fish, I first want to take a quick chance to talk about some of this complex geometry that happened with this fountain.
As you can see, there are a substantial amount of triangulations when we extruded and used the Follow Me tool around this geometry. Because my line down the bottom was a bit jagged and had some overlaps, as you can see, when I extruded it, it also extruded those overlaps. We need to be very careful when we are drawing and extruding things that we clean up our geometry and our overlap so we don't run into this effect.
One way to clean this up would be either softening the edge or physically hiding these edges. As you can see, if I was to double click into the group and then triple click this volume, you can see that the dashed lines are showing the areas that are either hidden or softened around the edge. If I go to my dialog box and I open up soften edges, which I already have open, so close that and open that, you can see that we have the slider here, which allows us to drag and control where the geometry is now kind of softening to a sense and basically hiding some of these edges.
And then coplanar will hide some additional edges as well, and you got to make sure this is all selected. However, as you can see that these little edges here, because they're overlapped and kind of underneath it, is not going away. If I was to go to the Erase button, Eraser, click this, and if I was to, you know, I'm just going to like erase these lines, you can see that I start cutting away my geometry.
So that's not what I want to do. I'm going to undo that. If you see down here on the bottom, it says Control equals Toggle Soften and Smooth, ALT equals Toggle Unsmooth/Unhide, and Shift equals Toggle Hide.
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So between Control and Shift, we can switch between Toggle Soften/Smooth and Toggle Hide. So as you can see, if I click Control, this is now Toggle Smooth, and if I hit Shift, the little darker curve next to that button equals Hide. If I go to smooth, and I see if I can click these things over smooth, you can see that nothing is really happening, right? Because this is all part of this kind of messed up geometry.
One way to clean that up will be clicking Shift to hide, and you can go around and you can click and drag and you can hide all of these, all of these objects or these edges to really clean that up until you can go all around the model and just making sure that if you accidentally, you know, click the button and you didn't hide anymore, I mean erase, you got to make sure that you have this as solid and click and drag. When I panned over, I held Shift. So I undid my shift command.
If you were to hold down Shift, and then your orbit thing to pan, it would unclick that shaded curve to get the hide. So I'll go back to hide, rotating around, cleaning up all these lines. So some of you may have, you know, drawn your fountain clean without all these jagged edges.
Or some of you may have looked just like mine or even worse. So this is one way to kind of clean it up and make it look a little bit better for presentations, or even just in your, in your model and perspectives. You could do the same thing for down here as well.
To kind of go all the way around and soften, clean up, hide, hide all these, these edges and these planes that are showing up. All right, that is looking much better. So as next time if you were to draw this fountain, one nice thing that we could have done, like I mentioned the Control Points with the Freehand Curve, is if you go to this Freehand Tool and you, you know, draw your shape of your fountain around.
And then if you were to, you know, zoom in, you can start seeing that, you know, some of this geometry, you know, looks pretty good. And if I was to Push/Pull this up, you know, you can see that this made a nice smooth edge versus this previous one did not look that way. So it's all how you draw.
You need to make sure that you're paying careful attention to your Freehand Tool and your lines and edges, making sure that they're, they're clean and well put together.
