Avoiding kinks with Meshsmooth

[Mahlon]

Hey,

I hear ya. Using meshsmooth can sometimes be very frustrating, getting it to work for you instead of letting it be your master. There are some common techniques that will help you understand the best way to model if you're going to meshsmooth it in the end. Here's a good tutorial at munkmotion that explains some of them:

http://www.munkmotion.com/tutorials/nsx/2a.htm


That said, I still definitely have not mastered meshsmooth with mechanical modeling. It's much easier with organics because of the general lack of hard edges. I hardly ever using creasing though.

One thing that I do in situations like your cockpit example is to model the cockpit and body as one piece and then break them apart. Depending on where you add geometry and if you don't add too much to one or the other after they are separated, then the seams stay more easily in line. Sorry, that's probably not very helpful.

Another thing is, when you're adding detail, it's sometimes good to collapse the stack with one iteration of meshsmooth (or 2, depending on how close the model will be getting to your camera so you don't see faceting edges). Once the model has an iteration or 2 of meshsmooth 'baked in', then you can add smaller details just as normal polymodeling and get all your chamfered edges and straight segments without having to worry about corners, creases and such.

Anyway, take a look at the article above, as well as the other tutorials on his site; very good stuff.

Mahlon

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