Tiny Tips

#1

Wasn’t there a random tip thread here somewhere? If someone can point me to it, I’ll move this over to that.

This is just a random tip, because I haven’t seen it on the net anywhere. It’s very simple, so most modelers will already know it.

If you want a hard edge on an SDS object, you don’t need to got nuts with the edges. You can use unwelded sections to create hard divisions. Say we have this shape:

And we want a hard edge around the lip. First, I select the top faces:

Then I press “x” to cut them out:

And “v” to paste them back in:

As long as the geometry on the edges is in the same place, the edges will meet up. And as long as it’s all on the same layer, it’ll still act like one shape in layout.

I’ll post more tiny-tips as I think of them. Feel free to post your own here.

#2

That’s a nicely illustrated tip. :thumbsup:
But…couldn’t one just highlight the faces in question and press [tab] to turn off SubD for those faces? No cut and paste steps needed.

#3

Not sure what you mean. Doing what you mentioned (select and tab) gives me something like this:

Which isn’t quite the same thing. The beauty of just unwelding those faces and leaving them in SDS mode is that they remain nice and smooth.

Basically, cutting and pasting sections like this is pretty much what wings3D does with it’s “hard edge” flag. It’s not variable edge weighting, just an on/off switch.

#4

Great tip.

Just wanted to note this only works when you don’t want smoothing between the edges.

#5

Or if you want a specific radius on that edge. Sometimes it’s hard to get exact with SDS. I’ll do this, Subdivide the surface a few times, then hit merge and run Rounder on the top edge.

#6

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