Mantaining the smooth curved surface of a cylinder while utilizing edge loops

#1


Hi, I’m modeling a component for a camera project I’m working on. One of the sides of the cylindrical body has a hole (rectangular in shape as you can see in the screenshot). To maintain the shape of the hole, I’ve added edge loops. However, this obviously causes creases (sharp edges) to appear on the model, thus ruining the smooth cylindrical curved surface as you can see in the screenshot.
I tried using the edge slide tool to try distributing the edges over the model but obviously, the entire point of the edge loop is lost if its not close to the edge you want to tighten.

I was wondering if there was a way to retain the smooth surface while maintaining the shape of the hole.

Thanks!
Arnav

#2

easiest way is to use more subdivisions on the cylinder…

#3

Yep, I thought of that, but I’d preferebly leave that as a last resort because I don’t want to spike the polycount unless absolutely needed. I’m not using it for games but I’d still like to minimize the size wherever possible so I was wondering if there were any techniques to achieve that.

#4

Have you tried using edge creasing? It can give control over mesh smoothing without adding a ton of geometry like edge loops does.

#5

Hi,
I just tried it. Unfortunately it still creates those hard creases that I cannot modify to maintain the smoothness. Also I tried just smoothing it but even after 3 or 4 subdivision levels, the creases remain so that doesn’t work for me either.

#6

I tried it, and it does fix the creasing, but it doesn’t give the results you’d want either.

It gives clean sharp corners (much easier to work with than adding edge loops), but doesn’t give a consistent height around the hole.

Do you actually need a geometry hole? You could use cutout alpha to make it transparent in the material, so smoothing doesn’t get confused.

#7

Hi, thanks for the solution. Learned a new tool today! I also found a workaround of sorts. Basically if you smooth the cylinder first and then delete the faces, the hole remains intact and the smooth curvature is retained.