SubPatches still scary

[hdace]

Hi. I've been making models (not terribly good ones) for nearly a year now, and I still occasionally bump against unexpected SubPatch distortions.

Today I've been making a a bugspray can. I've uploaded a jpeg and would appreciate one or two of you taking a quick look. The top of the metal part is covered up now by the plastic button, but if it weren't, you'd see those ugly "rib" effects. How do you get rid of those?

But more frustrating, I booleaned the round plastic top. I knew that when I SubPatched it, I should only select the side polygons. The top doesn't need to be SubPatched, and many of the polys have more than 4 sides anyway. As you can see, the two top corners peel away on the side leaving unsightly holes. I've tried everything I can think of to stop this from happening. I often have this problem. There must be an easy way of fixing it.

Please, someone clue me in!

Thanks, Hal Dace

[oDDity]

Don't use booleans at all when you intend to subpatch, it's much easier and cleaner just to model the thing properly in the first place.
I guess the rib effect you are referring to is caused by a star (triangles all meeting in the middle like a slice of orange) One thing you can do is select them in adjoining pairs and shift+z to merge them all into quads.

[hdace]

Don't use booleans at all when you intend to subpatch.

I thought I was being clever. Very good advice. Looking back, I realize I could have created it much faster without boolean. I still need a library of rules of thumb as to when to use tools one doesn't use very often.

Hal

[hdace]

It looks like you need to merge some points to get rid of the corner artifacts. Try looking at your base geometry and see if you have two points on top of each other. You can use the point statistics "w" as a helper here.

You need to perform mesh clean up after doing booleans.

Merge was the first thing I tried. I don't know how to do mesh clean ups. Need to look into that. Will go back to the manual, or check other resources.

Thanks, Hal

[hdace]

I guess the rib effect you are referring to is caused by a star (triangles all meeting in the middle like a slice of orange) One thing you can do is select them in adjoining pairs and shift+z to merge them all into quads.

Absolutely correct. And I had no idea you could merge polys so easily. How did I miss that? I'm also only just beginning to understand that quads subpatch better than tris. Is that true?

Thanks, Hal