stretching & tearing - solution??

[Piflik]

You'll have to subdivide the top and bottom polys by hand. MSmooth and TSmooth don't work well with N-Gons. In many cases you can get away with insetting, but here it is not so easy. You'll get bad triangulation at the concave parts of the mesh in any case.

The easiest way (without subdividing the top and bottom) would propably be to inset the top and bottom polys and delete them afterwards. Then apply a TSmooth and a Cap Holes Modifier.

[Cnine]

aah ok thanks, i'll give it a go. :)

[Benzin]

I would model it with spline modeling, better approach.

[inka]

Select the top and bottom in polymode and hit Retriangulate in the Edit polygons rollout.

[Piflik]

Retriangulate won't work. TSmooth turns the mesh to quads.

[Cnine]

thanks for the comments guys! not found a solution to this yet; tried the above...

ive not explored splines in max before though so thats kind of a last resort - I really want this to be poligonal though - I dont know enough about spline modeling

[Cnine]

I box modelled it and created some discusting edgeflow around the arm rest's groove

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v225/rosshildick/Untitled-3.jpg

can anyone, using the file in the original post, care to show me how it should be done?

another Ref: here (http://tbn1.google.com/images?q=tbn:tgWdkGuXfZc8lM:http://www.halfstepdown.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2008/08/fender-vg2.jpg) and here (http://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/c4d-ibanez-jem-guitar-zipped/301500)

[eldee]

Without actually modeling anything, I can tell you:

#1) draw a spline/curve (whatever your package calls it) around the shape of the base, use as few points as possible, so really pull on those bezier handles to make the shape work. IIRC in max the number of vertices created in a mesh is proportional to the number of points you use on your spline.

#2) with a lower number of polygons, it won't fit the shape precisely, but if you've followed the contours it will pop into place when you subdivide it. At this point you can quadrify the giant N-gon by hand. Afterward you can subdivide, or leave it lower-res and subdivide at render time.

Honestly what you've done is an okay method, it just yields an extremely dense mesh, and I can't imagine that capping that n-gon was a very fun process

[Cnine]

ok yeah thanks i understand, but what's IIRC? (sorry) =/

lol.

[inka]

Use an simple plane object, and do some edge extrude.

[eldee]

ok yeah thanks i understand, but what's IIRC? (sorry) =/

lol.
"If I recall correctly" it's pretty common, I promise I didn't make it up :)

[Cnine]

Use an simple plane object, and do some edge extrude.

awesome! thanks


and thanks to everyone else :)

[newellteapot]

whatever software you are using, just box model a rough shape and then add edgeloops where need and extrude where needed :)

it's the simplest approach, you'll get a clean mesh easy to tweak and change.