Technique advice: Extruding 2d shapes and smoothing

[Kanga]

I'm not sure what you are doing,.... but I would transform the thing into an editable poly straight away (when skinned) and just apply normal modeling techniques to get the result I wanted.

[Ls3D]

Have you played with smoothing groups? What about keep from crossing on the bevel mod? A picture would help.

-Shea

[Aragorn26282]

So I've got a complex 2d spline (like a font/text) and I've extruded it and found that it was too edgy...I wanted something smoother...so I used bevel...bevel was nice, but my problem is the actual 2d surface...whats a good method of smoothing the 2d extruded surface? my problem is that it creates lots of long edges and meshsmooth mangles them horribly even when they are hidden. Anyone got any advice on smoothing and rounding off the extruded 2d surface?
Hello. I have the same problems, while building my acoustic guitar. Look in this topic: http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?t=185007 and look at Deathcricket's post. He suggested a method that I have successfully tried.

[uzik]

The important thing I learned about mesh smooth was that it only works well with square polygons.

[lehthanis]

Here's an example of my problem...whats the best way to deal with stuff such as this. My last project it was meshsmooth that was havign trouble with these...this project its the 3d displace shader thats having trouble with it. I want to extrude an engraving on that surface...all the interior polygons are hidden (dotted lines) and the exterior ones ar visible...is there a better way? This started as a spline that was beveled 2 levels with curved sides.

[uzik]

The polys shown are all triangular, not square. I've seen meshsmooth give a lot of problems with those
and the only way to fix it was to use square polygons. You might try box modeling instead. Start with a
box and extrude, size, and move the polys to get the shape you want. It will meshsmooth much easier.
Also look at smoothing groups, you can achieve a lot of what you want without meshsmooth.

Looking at your model you have a LOT more polygons than you need.
If a surface is flat you really only need one poly to represent it. You might use more if you were
going to do some texturing, but to represent the shape you don't need more.
It will render faster, edit much easier, and take less RAM.

[lehthanis]

Those edges are all hidden though, and it was made from a spline that was extruded.

A square poly is merely two triangles with their common edge set to invisible, and yes, thats what mesh-smooth operates on. But here...all those internal edges are invisible, so how can I make that big flat bird shaped surface not so crappy?

In other words...whats the NEAT way to extrude a spline...I don't have time to box model all these shapes that were created in illustrator and imported.

[lehthanis]

Although this doesn't give me good smoothing, it does help me with things such as displace modifiers. I used mesh select and selected the faces of the 2d spline's extrusion and then applied a subdivide modifier, which luckily gave me many faces inside the 2d spline instead of triangulated lines all over the place.

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