Optimizing Crates

In this post, I’ll go through the optimization done by my group members, on the crates I modeled some time ago.

Post Apocalyptic Crate

Andreas Calmius was tasked with optimizing one of my crates. He pointed out that the by far worst problem with the crate, was that I had decided to make it half open. one half of the lid was attached to the crate, while the other revealed an opening into the crate, which forced the insides of the crate to be modeled (and optimized) as well.  On top of that, there was the duc tape, which was wrapped around the whole thing, resulting in a mess were the crate, lid and duc tape met.

None the less, he managed to go through it and fix most things by detaching the lid from the crate, and work on it separately. However, most of the construction was left as it was.

Apart from the lid, there wasn’t too much to struggle with. There were places, especially on the duc tape, were I hadn’t kept the lines flowing as much, and there were vertices that had too many trianges connected to them.

For future models, I should probably look further into what path I should take to reach my end goal. The way I made the lid and duc tape wasn’t very spectacular. I should probably have attached the entire lid to the crate, the little opening wasn’t worth the trouble. Also, I should work more on the edge flow.

Medieval Crate

My medieval crate was optimized by Björn Berndtsson. He had some severe problems with my medieval crate. He struggled with removing excessive edges on the flat surfaces of the crate. What he failed to realize was that the surfaces wasn’t completely flat, and I used most of the edges to crate an asymmetry in the wooden planks, making it look slightly crooked and a bit more natural.

Björn gave the edges a nicer flow in many cases, and also fixed overlapping vertices. However, there was an increase in n-gons and some of my shapes disappeared with the removed edges.

I probably shouldn’t have given the crate as many segments as I did when I created it. I did use a bunch of them for the crookedness, but there were still many segments I didn’t use. I also need to continue working on getting a better edge flow.

Sci-Fi Crate

The sci-fi crate I optimized myself. The main problem with the sci-fi crate was the tanks at the back. It was a similar problem to the inside of the post apocalyptic box. The narrow spaces between the tanks and the box was really difficult to fiddle with, and it didn’t feel very necessary either, as you can’t really see anything back there. None the less, I had to get back there and fix thing.

Yet again, there were a few problems with the edge flow, especially by the at the round front piece, the stitching I’d preformed there was quite bad. There was also a bunch of completely useless lines running along the flat surfaces on the crate sides and top.

I found that placing the camera inside the crate and using x-ray, granted me a far better perspective for working with the narrow spaces. I know there should be tools for detaching and attaching objects easily to be able to manage details better, but I haven’t been able to get a hang of them yet.

If I’d do this from the beginning, I would probably not go with those stupid narrow spaces, at least not without a good reason. If I really needed it to look like that, I’d keep the tanks as separate objects.