Lecture 86: Knight

[Anim_Ator]

Second attempt:

First attempt:

This was difficult. Could not get all planar surfaces right, some are still blue.

[LucidityOfPower]

Having planes is not always good. It is nearly impossible if it isn’t impossible by itself to get everything planar, especially on complex shapes like faces. Try the monkey mesh. You’ll find that it has a lot of distortion. This is totally OK.

That being said, the real problem is how your mesh works together–does it create the right shape? Yours looks like it has serious issues. I have a knight that has many distortions but it renders correctly. It’s important that you worry more about how it renders rather than its being planar. And, even if you fix it, it’ll still look wrong. Blender simply creates planar faces even if you don’t do it on your model. It’s evident in your horse, near the neck, and on its body (front). The cutting of the face into triangles, that is.

See my old horse:

And see my new horse:

As you can see, even if there is distortion, it renders just fine. As mentioned before, planar is good, but it cannot be avoided all the time and it can damage the final appearance of the mesh.

Look here:

And refer to this post (below is taken from this link), and scroll down to the monkey mesh (2nd post): https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/46113/how-to-make-all-quads-or-ngons-on-your-mesh-planar-2d

There is no way to make them all planar without changing overall shape of the mesh a lot or the topology. Here is why:

To make faces planar, we need to move the vertices. So for each vertex we will see all the faces around it, get their normals, from each of these normals construct a plane and where those planes intersect store a new vertex. From all these new vertices then make a new mesh with the same topology and switch it for the old one. Very simple, but it has one catch: when a vertex has more than 3 surrounding faces, their planar intersection does not necessarily exist - it would be actually very rate if it did.

To meet them at single point, some plane translation is inevitable and depending on the angles this translation can be huge and ruin the shape of object.

So to create mesh from these intersecting planes (made from normals of faces) one would have to create a different mesh with a totally new topology, different vertex count (depending on the mesh shape) by basically chiseling a solid with these planes (would you accept this solution?) .

To be honest, I should have stuck with my first model that had all the distortion because it simply looks better. But I had no idea and I fell for the same trap as you have: trying to make everything planar.

Please don’t worry about it too much–you’re stifling your creativity, unless you can deal with “chiseling a solid” for the rest of your life in models

[Anim_Ator]

Thank you for the detailed explanation. It is good to know that its not possible to get all planar surfaces and that the rendered view is more important. I appreciate your help.

[LucidityOfPower]

Absolutely. Happy to help! I’m a bit upset personally that my previous knight was scrapped because of this newbie mistake that I, too, made (I’m a newbie just like you). Did a lot of research and came to that conclusion from all the frustration I had gone through in the end

I forgot to add that your first attempt was also better than your second in my opinion. You shouldn’t have given up on it!