Theoretical SUB-D

#141

(<-cokechug.gif)

#142

Levin, thanks for the link, that’s quite useful. For further reference to others visting Levin’s link, search for “DigitalCritter”, that’s the guy doing the illustrated explanations over there.

I think I’m starting to understand why the red lines in the images I drew up aren’t edgeloops. Or at least ready to accept that they just aren’t, because of the way the edges hits the verts (three edges for a vert is not enough etcetc… er… hm, that’s exactly what Xaint points out, so yeah, I guess I’m just a little slow :). Oh, as did Iain back on page 4 come to think of it… I’m guessing others have said it as well, it just didn’t sink in :slight_smile:

I suspect some good tutorials on this could be (and probably has been) written, to specifically teach people the workflow of loops, quads, pole and tri avoidance, etc.
Certainly the information present in this thread could be compiled into HTML form. Which is something I’d very much like to do (or see done) further down the road when things calms down a notch.
For now, jeez, the thread is still growing by a couple of pages a day :drool:

#143

It’s interesting to note that if you delete the top polygon (the one marked in red) the edges become a loop. Just had to say that add to the confusion

#144

Originally posted by urgaffel

I think that there were some problems regarding smoothing with the old meshsmooth, but I won’t swear on it.

Well, in fact you would swear by it, you would swear pretty oftern as it turned out. The problem was with how the smoothing of the old meshsmooth would stuff up the texture mapping. You would get funny distortions in the rendered image. Thats why max 5 has “Old Style Mapping” in the meshsmooth modifier. It re-creates that “bad” effect of versions 4.2 and back for compatiablity with old files.

As for defining what is a loop, try it with a sphere, like this image.
Just like your box, the blue is NOT an edge loop, why, well its a face/polygon, but the green are edge-loops, since they run “around” the sphere, in well a loop :slight_smile:

Hope that helps.

PS. I post a little reply on page one, don’t connect for two days and we hit 10 pages, still way cool stuff. Just when one thinks they know sub-d, you learn even more.

PS. While this is pretty late for the whole “What is sub-d” debate, I think it was Iain that had it correct. Max doesn’t have true sub-d, like Renderman, it fact it would be better to call all this Low-Poly-Modelling (LPM), with a smoothing effect (meshsmooth), used to incease and “smooth” the model surface out.
Just my $0.02 AUD worth, so its only about 1c to you yanks so its not really worth anything :slight_smile:

#145

Oh yeah, that was the beef with old meshsmooth. But wasn’t the tesselation not as good as the NURMS tesselation? I want to remember that you get smoother results from NURMS than old skool meshsmooth.

If you want to be really anal I guess you could call it Lowpoly modeling with averaged quad based tesselation?

Which gives me an idea.

The one who comes up with the most anal and toungue wrecking name wins a new icon!

:thumbsup:

#146

That’s the most hilarious use of the :surprised -smiley I’ve ever seen! :slight_smile:

Quad-poly-modeling is what I usually refer to it as. It’s not really anal enough though… hm. The “(Mostly) Quad Based Catmull-Clark Interpolated Smoothed Control-Cage-Driven Derived Surface” technique? Also, of course (duh) known as the (M)QBCCISCCDDS technique…

But yeah, I’m on the idea that when we mention SubD in here, unless otherwise noted, it “just” refers to the whole edgeloop and quad thing and such.

No!, screw it, you know what… personally I can’t live with that!, from now on I’ll be calling it (M)QBCCISCCDDS. Yeah. My acronym is much longer than anything Maya has!, hooray for MAX!
… cough.

Oh I should clear up a misunderstanding about the images I’ve posted. The blue outlines were not intended as a false edgeloop, the red lines were. Ie. the green outlines are actual edgeloops, the red ones aren’t, but I thought they should be, and the blue is an illustration thedaemon made to circle in a polygon to show us a point. Nothing more.
I don’t think it makes much sense as such, because somewhere the basic idea about that polygon seems flawed? Idunno… I can’t make sense of it at any rate. My blue polygon just showed that you can circle a polygon, and have it go through nothing but edgeloops, without “destroying” the edgeloops. Er… yeah…

Please, do add to the subject if there is some way you feel edgeloops and such makes sense. For now it seems it’s a matter of just accepting that you have got to have four edges per vertice to carry on a loop. Which entirely makes sense… I think someone not caught up in my confusion-sphere is likely to think “er… duh, yeah”. And you’re likely right, I may’ve made a fuzz about nohing.

…wait, urgaffel did mention the thing with the red non-edgeloop BECOMING a proper edgeloop, when the topfaces are deleted… yikes… I guess it would be an outline then right? Or whatever it’s called, I can’t remember, but ePoly has a specific mode for selecting those. Hm.

No really, you’re all welcome to chime in with an easy explanation… :slight_smile:

[edit] mwhaha!, more editing! [/edit]

#147

It’s the argh smiley :wink:

And lovely term for what we do in max lol

Loops with 3 and 5 edged vertices can’t be selected. I guess it’s because they end in a pole or other… But! Like I said, if you delete the polygon on top of the box, you get a hole and can use the loop selection. I guess it has to do with what comes next after the edge in question. Hole/Nothing or polygon. Hole seems fine while polys don’t.

edit

Dude! Don’t edit while I’m replying! /me hits gaggle over the head with a search engine

J/k

Feel free to use the über argh smiley. Url is: http://pchan.cgworks.com/stuff/argh2.gif spread it all over the web! (but please don’t link to my site, save it and upload it to your own :))

#148

gaggle:

The reason that top ring of edges is’nt a loop is because the 4 verts that make up the top are poles. Iain Mcfadzen wrote a bit about this in the first fiew pages of the thread.

It makes sense, but is really counter-intuitive.

-3DZ

:smiley:

#149

It’s not the smooth, but the curve! Classical mesh-smooth is for organic modelling only. For being not even I don’t recommen it for mechanical surfaces. But experiment with it, I’m interested what you ppl. can do with it.

What’s that stuff with the textures? If I get it right it works fine with MAX5, is it true?

Btw. what XDUGEF is? I tought it’s a joke, but…:shrug:

#150

For more advanced Loop Splits…:
http://www.maya3d.dk/Scripts/MJPolyTools/

#151

Originally posted by Xaint

What’s that stuff with the textures? If I get it right it works fine with MAX5, is it true?

Under max 5 all is fine, but with older versions, the meshsmooth would distort textures when rendered, so in order to get it to look right, you had to make the texture look wrong. I am pretty sure it was a bug in the code for meshsmooth and not a bug with meshsmoothing.

#152

Offtopic: yesterday the subject of edge loops came up and, being a newbie, i found it very useful information. But now im wondering what a pole is, so how about a (sticky) thread that explains all these terms once and for all would that be a good idea? if so where should i start it?

#153

Iain defined what a pole is way back in the first 3 or 4 pages. Rather than repeating it, just read the thread form the begining.

-3DZ

:smiley:

#154

I’m almost certain that i’m missing something that’s blindingly obvious…but is there an ‘extrude edge’ type tool in EPoly? I’ve been forced to use the ‘create poly’ doo-hickey, and sometimes it’s annoying, because vertices are often placed away from the object, meaning i’ll have to reposition…i’m lazy…:slight_smile:

I think i came up with a logical solution to this…but i can’t seem to remember what it was :slight_smile:

#155

Just select a poly, edge, vertex, or border, and click extrude.

So to answer your question, an extrude edge function comes with EPoly.

Hope that’s of some help.

-3DZ

:smiley:

#156

Extrude is greyed out when in edge sub selection here. HMmmmmm…:annoyed:

I’m doing something wrong.

#157

Or I’m using Max 5…

I’m sorry, but I don’t have R4 loaded anymore…Works in 5, that’s all I know.

Hmmmm…

#158

Originally posted by mrfandiwagon
I’m almost certain that i’m missing something that’s blindingly obvious…but is there an ‘extrude edge’ type tool in EPoly? I’ve been forced to use the ‘create poly’ doo-hickey, and sometimes it’s annoying, because vertices are often placed away from the object, meaning i’ll have to reposition…i’m lazy…:slight_smile:

You could always select the adjacent polygons, clone them, position them to suit and weld them onto the appropriate edge.

#159

You can’t create a single polygon that isn’t part of the model on all vertices.

That sounds really strange…

See it like this. You have a box with two segments and want to create a polygon in the middle, pointing outwards, perpendicular to the rest, like so:
__
||
|_|^single poly (one-sided)
^box

You can’t do this since Editable Poly doesn’t allow it. Edit/able Mesh does though.

To be able to extrude edges, they have to be the outline/border of a hole. And to actually extrude edges, shift+drag or use extrude button.

edit

Oh yes, in max 4 you need an updated version of the Epoly.dlo. Otherwise shift+dragging edges won’t work. Can be found on plugin sites (it’s free)

#160

Originally posted by mrfandiwagon
[B]Extrude is greyed out when in edge sub selection here. HMmmmmm…:annoyed:

I’m doing something wrong. [/B]

Yes, your using max version 4.2 or less, hehe sorry.

That was one of the things that really pissed me off about that last version. The extrude edge worked in editiable mesh but not poly.

My solution was to just convert the mesh over, do stuff and then when need be, convert back to poly.

Like 3DZ said, its no longer an issue in max 5 :slight_smile: