3D Class – Week 3

I’m still trying to catch up with the blog posts for 3D class. This is the post for the 3^rd week, and it’s about the optimization of my crates.

During this week we got to optimize the crates in class, but instead of doing only our own crates, we got divided into groups of three and got to optimize one crate from each of the other students in the group. I was in a group together with Camilla and Anita.

– Urban Crate

Camilla got to optimize my urban garbage bin crate, and it had some problems with overlapping faces and open edges. All the problems were at the top part of the model, and you can see them in the following screenshots.

For some reason there were only green rectangles (overlapping indicator) on this side of the crate and the opposite side, but I’m pretty sure that all four sides had the same problem. It was the same with the open edges indicator (green lines), but maybe there’s some explanation for it…

Anyway, in order to fix these problems you need to know what the actual problems are. Why are there open edges and overlapping faces?

I tried to move around some of the vertices in the trouble areas, and as you can see in the screen shot above, there are some that aren’t connected. The screenshot to the right shows what the model looked like after Camilla had optimized it, and how it should look when done correctly. (I moved the middle vertex upwards like in the screenshot to the left.)

One way to solve this problem is to target wield or wield the vertices, which merges them together. In fact, this was the solution to all the problems with this crate, since there seemed to be a lot of vertices that weren’t connected in the model.

When I first created this model I did the top part as a separate element, and because I didn’t really have that much of a clue about 3D back then, I just placed it on top of the other part and didn’t even think about connecting them together. In the screenshot above, you can see that especially the corners are a bit of a mess, with edges and vertices overlapping each other.

To clean this mess up and wield these vertices together, you first need to remove the polygons inside otherwise the wield function or target wield won’t work. In the screenshot above, the yellow arrow shows one of the removed polygons (there were also a polygon above the other), and the red arrow shows the result of the wielding of two corner vertices.

There were some overlapping vertices on the inside of the model as well, which was fixed the same way.

In the following screenshots you can see how the fixed corner looks, but also how the overlapping faces were fixed. These areas had problems with overlapping vertices as well, and the solution was to wield them together. (The red arrow in the screenshot indicates where the selected vertex was target wield to.)

To summarize, the problem was that the model was divided in two parts and that there were lots of vertices that weren’t connected and overlapped each other.  The solution to this problem was to stich the vertices and parts together, delete eventual unnecessary polygons, and all the open edges and overlapping faces disappeared.

The screen shot to the left shows the optimized version that Camilla did, and to the right there’s a screen shot of the same model but with small changes that I made. I deleted some edge loops that I didn’t think was necessary, and moved some vertices here and there to straighten things out a bit.

And to be completely honest, I realized just now while putting together this post that deleting some of the edge loops actually changed the shape of the crate a little (especially around the “feet”).

It didn’t matter that much to me really (I mean, I would have noticed it earlier otherwise…), but it’s something that I really need to think about more when working in 3D. How to keep things in shape and the simplest way to do it.

I think the crate looks better this way though, but I thought that I would try and see if I could come up with a way to keep the shape/silhouette around the bottom part of the crate without keeping the original edge loop.

I don’t know if it’s completely correct, but atleast I gave a try. I’m still not that sure whether or not one should use triangles that much in one’s models…

Okay, moving on to the other crates.

– Cartoony Crate

Anita got to optimize my cartoony crate, and the main problem with it was open edges.

Anita asked Nataska about this, and she said that there shouldn’t be a problem if the edges are on the inside, so Anita let it be.

One week ago, when I was thinking about how to further optimize this crate before handing it in, I found myself stuck and asked Nataska for some advice. (I didn’t really like that there were so many open edges, and I even thought about redoing the crate from scratch.)

She took another look at it and gave me tips on how to optimize it. As you can see in the screenshots above, I had divided up the model in many different parts, and that’s why there were so many open edges. According to Nataska, it was okay that they were separate, but the brown details on the inside made things unnecessary complicated. (Seen to the far left in the third screenshot in the image above.)

Instead, she thought that I should delete the brown part, and then bridge the opening in the box (as seen in the middle screenshot in the image below).

After that, I only needed to extrude that new polygon inwards (which can be seen in the third screenshot, image above) to make the box look like it did before, but I had to make sure that I didn’t extrude to far so that there were a gap between the yellow details and the face of the extruded polygon.

During this phase I also removed some edge loops that didn’t serve any purpose anymore, and lastly I did some target wielding in the corners and then the box was done.

– Medieval Crate
I created a new medieval crate/treasure chest shortly after the crate optimization class, since I wasn’t too happy with it. I had been experimenting a lot with the old one, with things that was a bit too advanced for me at the moment, and I felt that I wanted to try and create a new one.

I also thought that it would be a great opportunity to test my new skills (and knowledge), and I wanted to try and prevent creating open edges and overlapping faces in the model, since all of my crates before had had problems with those.

The image above shows how the model looked before optimization. You can see in the following screenshots that I mostly target wielded some vertices in the corners of the chest’s lid when I optimized it.

I also deleted the bottom part of the chest, since Nataska said that it doesn’t have to be there unless it’s supposed to be seen. (In this case it won’t be seen since the chest will be standing on a flat surface).

The finished crate.

Thinking back, I believe that I really learned a lot more by doing this way, and I also saved a lot of precious time by being careful from the start with the model. Now, I mostly needed to do some slight target wielding during the optimization phase, and I had no problems with either overlapping faces or open edges. (I think I manage to prevent these problems by being a lot more careful when using tools such as extrude and bevel, and that I also tried to keep the model as united as possible instead of separate everything like I did before.)

– – –
When it comes to what I’ve learnt from this assignment and what I’ll be able to use in my future work, I would say that keeping it simple is a good way, but also that it’s okey if something goes wrong. I had a real trouble trying to stich together one of my groupmates’ crates, but I really learnt a lot from it, and now I know how to fix problems like the ones in my urban crate. (Which I didn’t known how to fix at all just some weeks ago.)

I’ve also learnt that it’s very important to think about the silhouette and the shapes of the model that you’re making. The fact that I totally missed that I had “ruined” the silhouette a little with my urban crate, by deleating an edge loop that I thought wasn’t that important, shows that it’s something I really should think about more.

Other than that, I don’t know. I’ve really learnt a lot these past weeks, and it’s a bit difficult to remember it all and put it down into words…things will probably/hopefully become a bit clearer when I’ve learned and worked some more.

– – –

And that’s all for this time. I’ll try and get some more 3D posts done this week.

About Rebecka Nyström

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