Tutorial   for   anim8or   on   fixing   buggy/wrongly  modeleld moddels

OR

...How to make your moddel perfect...   :)

Tutorial made by Mr.Smeagol

      I'm  gonna use this model "door_notfixed.an8 " to show you generaly what can be done for this model to enhance it / fix the bugs / and optimize it.

This is simple castle door model (textures are removed).

Wireframe:

Flat shaded:

The whole front side can actualy be one face instead of 36 faces - nicer shading sometimes, faster rendering, .an8 file is much smaller  (less Kb)

This are the bugs made by incorect way of modelling.

We will fix this bugs, but first let's lower the poly count:

This is done by selecting all this faces...

...then go  / Edit --  Merge Faces   *( or shift+m)

And you should get this:

Then repeat this same thing on the back side of doors and you get this:

Now lets take a closer look to see the bugs:

In workspace:                                                    Rendered:

And side view, viewed from certain angle:

Now this is the way we fix this...

...First select all this faces:

And then delete them! (press "delete" key)

This is how it should look from side view now:

Now use "add edge" tool to add edges where they are missing:

And same here, and here, and here...

Now we have edges on the places that were cousing bugs by not having that edges.

Now select all this edges.... and fill the holes!, ones that we made with "delete" and then fixed the edges.

Now it looks much better - most of the bugs are fixed...      It looks like this....  (see the difference betwen this and the 11'th pic- similar to this)

Now let's lower the poly count of bottom side:

Select this 3 faces and merge them as before...

But the points are still here... and we don't want them here so we select them like this ( first one row then another) and then merge them:

Set this value to 999 (just to make shure they all merge no matter of the size of object)

And now do it with the other row of points as well:

Now you have 2 extra points left - we'r just gonna remove them to make the model perfect.   ...going 4 pure perfection...

 Take both points and move them right next to the other two point  - like this:

And we need to get them close like this:

And now merge the each two points standing close together.

Like this:     (Don't forget to do both- left 2 points merge together & right 2 points merge together)

Now let's say we want this model to be little smoother - but we don't want to use subdividing couse of too many extra polies it would get.       Just a few cuts will be enough:

 And then...

Now select these 2 points(actually 4 - but it looks like two from this view) , and use "non uniform scale", drag mouse just a bit to the right, to make it smooth transition.   (hint - compare the last 2 pics at the places where we cutted it. The 2'nd pic is already scaled/smoothed)

Now do the same thing here, and here, and here, and...

(little cut then little scale/smooth)

We have only 1 bug left now... you can leave it like this if you want...  but I always like my models to be as perfect as I can make them to be.

Here it is, the shading bug... caused by that 2 faces not actualy being connected but just being very close to each other.

We won't merge the faces - that would lead to more bugs... we will merge the points on that edge - when points are merged anim8or knows that that 2 faces are connected, and the smooth shading transition comes by itself.

Use rectangle select in the red marked area to select both points (it only looks like one point - you would see there are two points there actually, if you zoomed it                         And merge them:

Do the same with the other one:

And voila!!!

Here is the download link door_fixed.an8  of fixed model - for reference,,, ...thanx to startrekfan for providing this model, now his modeling skills are much better than at the time he made this model  :)

This technics showed in this tutorial are the basic for fixing / perfecting / or optimizing   any model.    

I hope you learned something from this tutorial :)...

                                                      Mr.Smeagol