Help: Fixing Non-Planar quads

Hello again - do any of you have any links or tips for fixing my model? Or would it be a case of starting again?

I like how it looks - but cannot quite figure out how to apply the overview of fixing the non-planar things from the lessons. If I apply the modifier it’s still broken. If I zero the zs of verts then they are in the wrong place. I feel like I missed something.

Thanks in advance, Paul

(related previous thread here: LP Knight - could do with a hand though / feedback - stream of what I did (wrong?) here: https://www.twitch.tv/paulecoyote/v/101646213 )

Yeah, just turn the mesh checker off and use the rendered view with your mirror and edge split modifiers turned on to check your mesh.
The mesh checker will turn any face blue regardless of what the edge split modifier is doing. This seems to be the point of the edge split… That it gets around the non-planar geometry.
If it’s still rendering triangles then I suggest starting again using only the rendered view to check your model.

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I had a dickens of a time trying to get the faces back to planar. It seems that I was only able to actually fix a face when I had the “Transform orientation” (the one that normally says global at the bottom the screen to “Normal”

Additionally, check out stack exchange. Someone was kind enough to point me to a link over there. Unfortunately, I lost the link.

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Thanks for the responses!

@Nate_Whitrow not sure I want to start again - I feel like this is a skill that could do with an entire lecture or two on going over the different ways of avoiding it in more detail. When I apply the Edge Modifier and look at the analysis things are still blue (though sometimes they are different things). Funny because Michael says exactly that - that applying it won’t help. Though when exporting it to Unity / Unreal of course those modifiers don’t mean anything unless applied.

@GymMammoth I’ll hunt around for that thread - but what steps did you do to fix the transform on each quad? I feel like if I have a heuristic steps I could follow to I could figure this out. I think I did have it set to Local - I thought I had tried it Normal too but to be honest I was just trying to brute force the thing and cannot remember what I tried and what I haven’t.

I feel like if the edge loops are somehow normalised that perhaps the warping wouldn’t happen? Perhaps if the two entire loops were all at exactly the same z. I may try that again later. Around the neck I’m not sure I could do that, but around the body I think I should. If I get a sense about how to fix this stuff and why exactly it is broken I will be more confident about leaving this model and progressing - having taken away what I need from it.

I just ignored the mesh analysis, and my model came out beautifully. But that’s easy for me to say and not so helpful for you…
If you ignore the mesh analysis, and set the edge split modifier split angle to 0 what does your model look like when rendered?

Yeah it looks better but the mesh analysis still says it is off after I apply it.
Also I must apply it with “smooth” on or it seems to do nothing.

For what it’s worth playing around with the numbers and trying to fix I think I understand how I broke it so terribly in the first place. I was just dragging around verts without considering the non-planar thing. Manually hammering out each quad and making it really boxy I saw what I was doing and it struck me.

I think I understand better now why all the operation we were doing on the edge loops were scales and constrained rotates.

So for anyone else playing along to “fix” this I went around changing verts in a way that all four edges always only had a change in 2 axis. This of course ruined those parts of the model I was “fixing” but did make those sections planar and hammer home what I had done to get things out of whack.

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I did what @Nate_Whithrow did, I ended up pretty much ignoring it and using the Edge split modifier. I attempted to flatten a few of them, but the whole model ended up jostling around and I got frustrated. I have so many skills I need to work on, and I’m sure I’ll have to go through this again when I’m done, starting at video #1 to actually ensure that I’ve learned all the skills. But then I won’t spend 2 hours making a pawn!

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