3D Computer Graphics – Blog Post Week 03 – Part 1

This week we were asked to get into groups and try to optimize each others crates that we had been working on lately. Through the use of 3DS Max’s xView you can locate some of the common problems that can arise when modeling in 3D. Some of the things we have learned to correct are overlapping faces and vertices and how to make sure polygons consisting of more than 4 faces are taken care of.

Since none of my original teammates was present during the model-correctional exercise I was put in a different group that already had 2 models each to correct. That resulted in me taking two of their crates for correction and instead of me writing about what they had done to my crates I was told to write what I did to theirs. In this blog post I will also include a brief description of what I did to improve one of my own crates.

Viktor’s sci-fi crate:

Viktor’s crate was near perfect from the start. It had none of the problems we were taught to look for and aside from removing a very small amount of edges that wasn’t necessary to uphold the structure of the model itself, I couldn’t find anything to improve.

Ahmad’s Medieval crate:

First of this model had some problems with overlapping faces. To correct this issue I simply moved the face that was causing this problem a bit to make sure that the edge of the face didn’t overlap with the face right next to it.

My next step with this crate was to fix the overlapping vertices. What I did was to quite simply weld them together.

I also noticed a kind of distortion around the large faces on the side of the crate, it turns out that there were way to many edges there which served no particular function which gave the face a distorted look. The last thing i did with this model was to eliminate all the unnecessary edges and give the thing a thorough clean up.

My own Sci-fi crate

My model had 1900 triangles, problems with open faces and overlapping vertices.
The first step I took towards cleaning up my model to weld the open faces and correct any edges that became crooked because of the welding. When I had welded open faces together and corrected the overlapping vertices I started removing excess edges. When I had thoroughly cleaned up my model I started adding edges where needed in order to correct ngons.

And here is the final result.

Next time I model I will take my time and make sure that things are properly attached before moving on. The middle part of my crate was created using a separate object, part of the reason why is that i didn’t have a well thought out plan for what to do with my model and if i had to do it again I imagine the process will be much less complex. Because i didn’t know what i was going for I couldn’t plan ahead as much as I would have wanted to.