Dann-O opened this issue on Oct 10, 2006 · 823 posts
CaptainJack1 posted Wed, 18 October 2006 at 5:36 AM
Quote - @jevans69, thats a pretty cool looking mail bag...the geometry looks fine to me {as far as I know LOL, Im still learning geometry and UV's}
Thank you. I'm always my own worst critic... On the mail bag, I made the strap running around the outside of the bag first, then I made a copy of the strap and scaled it inward a bit to start the bag, then I extruded the bag downward. The problem I ran into was as folds came together, the polys would overlap, and I was erasing vertical edges to fix it. That left me with several places that had five sided polys where I probably should have tightened them up into triangles and quads; that makes the mesh more portable to more kinds of software, and makes it less likely that there will be a twisted face where the vertices aren't all actually lying in the same plane.
Also, the bottom of the bag was kind if a nightmare; I got to that point and couldn't come up with a good way to close it off, so I finally extruded the bottom row, scaled it in really flat, then made a "button" out of a cylinder to cover up the hole. Looks okay, I guess, but I left myself open to the thing looking kind of ragged if the bag gets scaled along only one or two axes.
In retrospect, I think I might have had better luck hollowing out a sub-divided cube, then deforming it into shape, rather than trying to extrude the bag a little at a time. If I make something similar in the future, I may try it that way, or use a different modeler that will let me define the outline of the bag with B-Splines.
Anyway... didn't mean to ramble. Thanks for your comment, I'm glad you liked it.
Captain Jack