Help! Unwanted Geometry :/

[Zii]

Hello e’rrybody!

I’ve been working on a Star Wars-esc hover craft and for some reason I’m getting these weird… “creases” in my geometry. As you guys can see, I don’t have any edges that should be splitting a rectangle or square into two triangles… but whenever I render it, or turn on ambient occlusion, there is a very evident shadow being cast by them.

The “engines” in back are subdivided, but the seat isn’t, so it’s not the subdivision… I don’t want to smooth shade it because it messes with some of the angles and takes away that ridged feeling.

I don’t want to keep working on it if all this extra geometry will mess up texturing in the end
Yelp please!

Here’s the render where it’s most apparent:

Here is the craft in wireframe mode, as you can see the triangles are not there…

And here are the biggest trouble areas in edit mode with ambient occlusion on…

Any ideas/tips/tricks/fixes?

[McFuzz]

Since Blender shows faces by using triangles, Blender is just trying to create your square face with two triangles since it’s not perfectly even, which is causing that effect.

However, I believe that the best way to fix this is to use the Edge Split modifier. Despite the fact that I’m not the best person to ask about this, I do believe that the edge split modifier is designed to eliminate that effect. You may want to look it up on the youtubes, or just mess around with it a bit.

Let me know if that helps It looks great by the way!!!

[Zii]

I think I’m not doing something right along the way because Edge Split doesn’t seem to be doing anything at all . The work flow I was trying was selecting all my edges with the problem, marking them as “sharp”, then selecting the edge split modifier and playing with the angle, which is what people seem to be saying to do, but I get no effect.

I then tried adding another edge perpendicular, but that just splits the triangles making more of them

Lastly, I also tried smoothing them with all the edges marked as sharp, which decreased the visibility of the triangles slightly, but didn’t get rid of them completely, it also made my entire object smaller.

[McFuzz]

In that case, I’m actually not so sure! You may want to use more geometry to tidy it up. Smaller squares will hopefully lead to less of that occurring. I’m sure there’s an easy fix somewhere, I’m just not sure what it is.

[Zii]

All fixed Thank you so much for the “Edge Split modifier” suggestion, that in fact was the solution!

The specific steps I took to get Edge Split to work right (in case anyone else is trying to fix a similar problem).

1.) (Tab) Edit mode, (A) select all edges that have the problem, (Ctrl+E) and select “Mark Sharp”.

2.) (Tab) Leave Edit mode, (T) Open Toolbar, select from under “Shading:” the option “Smooth”
(don’t worry if it looks weird for the time being.)

3.) Lastly, under the “Modifiers” tab, select “Edge Split”. It should work right away .

Thanks again to @McFuzz for the solution!

[Wartlp]

This artifact is called non planar geometry.