Arrrrggg!
 

Dogonnit I am getting frusterated. Alright... getting composed.


I am working on a rotunda kinda thing and I want to stencil windows in. Smooth shading makes it obvious my polys arent non-planar so I triple them, then subdivide them. The windows stencil properly but I still get warping on the wall that is just not cool.

Any thoughts?

Can you post an image so show us what's happening?

I was working on my spaceship with curved surfaces and had a lot of problems with the curved surface. I ended up creating a cylinder and doing a Boolean subtract, it made a much cleaner hole. It also aided in precise alignment of the cylinder to the plane of the surface. This is going to be my favorite technique for making windows from now on, stencilling seems to be a pretty messy way of creating windows.

I used my new technique AFTER I made this render:

http://members.cox.net/tranquility5/...pone_fixed.jpg

The render looks good, but I discovered when I made a render on the other side of the ship it had a lot of smoothing errors. I constructed half of the hull and got the smoothing errors down to acceptable levels, but when I mirrored it the smoothing errors re-appeared on the mirrored side. I gave up and rebuilt the hull using the Boolean subtract technique, it worked like a charm. No smoothing errors on either side.

Here is a look at what I am talking about.

If I stencil with the polys in thier original state, as in the first image, the non-planar nature of them will distort the window edges. After tripling and subdeviding I get results as seen in the second image. The windows are perfect.. all I would need to do is rebuild the polys for them, but as you can see the shading reveals an ugly picture. I think it is caused by modeler relying on itself to decide how to break the non-planar polys up. In my mind I need a way to have more control of how all that splitting occours. I am just not sure what'll do it.

I'll mess with bools, but I am somewhat skeptical. I have seen that phenominon, Spacedrive, where mirrored polys that should have exactly the same behaviors don't. Its an enigma, that's for sure.

Thanks guys for weighing in on this. Still looking for the golden egg though.

Helps to INCLUDE the image....

You are looking to do something like this, right? If so:

• Set your segments at a high enough level so you don't get non-planar problems.
• Use the knife tool(K) to cut the bottom and top of the window.
• Select the polys you want for the window.
• Select smooth shift(F) and Right Click.
• stretch(h) the X and z in to bring the window polys inside.
• set the wal sufrace to about 20% smoothing

The problem with mirror wierdness is usually caused my very close points being merged. Turn off auto merge and the problem usually goes away.

Cory, your plan is as clean as they get, but I think it would make my windows lean funny because my wall, a half-circle starts vertcal on the ends an ends up leaning at almost a 45 in the middle. I may try your way anyway, cause I am desperate.

(Darn it Cory you wern't supposed to reply... its for the shi.... the shi... p. I am stuck on it.)

Thanks

Well, I tried to take Cory's advice and am convinced he needs to do video tutorials... cause I didn't get it. It partly worked.

I did the knife cut, selected two polys for a test. Beveled them in a tad. Smooth-shifted them back. The result is the first picture.

Hit tab, and weighted my corner points all the way (to keep them square) and the result is the second picture. I found it interesting that they are different, even though they were both selected and doing the same thing the whole time.

The third picture (bottom) is a smooth shade of the second. Obviously the first window has problems but I don't like the second either. I cant seem to get sharper edges in sub mode.

On top of all that I would like to border the windows. Normally that would be an easy bevel, but I'm not sure now.

Thanks.

I'm not sure what is going on in your shots. Looks like you have either (a) some 4+ polys, (b), not all the polys are set to sub-D, or (c) one or more points at the corner need some weight map yet.

Adding detail to a curved surface is tricky. Take a look at one of Lewis' wireframes if you want to see some great detailing (http://vbulletin.newtek.com/showthre...threadid=11267).

Below I just grabded some polys off a disc object, 3 segments, and using smooth shift, right click, and drag built the window. Then I did a few bandsaw cuts to square out the opening. On a few of the vertical segments added by the bandsawing there was a crease so I welded a couple points to get rid of it (you can see the triangles at the corners where I did the welds). There is a very small crease in the corners that maight look bad if doing any close-ups. I think I did this by right-clicking too many times. On the left corners I added some weight mapping to see if that would help. You can see the difference in the wireframe.