me and my big mouth...duplicate faces on meshes

[jafs00]

hey guys, I'm posting this one to see if anyone can help me bail myself out of my bigmouthed promises.

 

So, I got a new job and most of the guys here use other programs to model stuff (mostly rhino and vectorworks)

 

When I got hired here, I was asked if I could take models modeled by other people and texture them and finish them up, I nonchallantly answered yes, easy as pie, almost to the point of having to contain myself from not laughing in their faces. What I did not know then is that my workmates are lazy modelers so they usually modify their models by mounting polygons over polygons (or meshes over meshes).

 

This result is that when I render other people's models here, black faces show up on the render.

 

I already talked to the other guys asking them to change their modeling habits, but in the meanwhile, does anyone know of a 3dmax function or script to eliminate or select duplicate faces on meshes or polygons, and if so , share your great wisdom with me, I will appreciate it immensely.

[pico]

maybe one simple trick could be to turn on "2 sided" in your materials, so you do not have to change anything in the models.

if not:

for a visual response to your model, you can turn on "show normals" or put "edit normals" so you see the duplicate faces, and can delete them manualy!

if there are too much of them a script would be good.

take a look at scriptspot search for "duplicate face" or "delete face" there are some scripts, i didnt try them so i can not recommend you one" but you can post your experiance later.

[SandmanNinja]

I'm guessing if there are co-planar faces, then they will more than likely be on different elements?

 

Switch to Select By Element, click where an offending face is suspect, and the element that it belongs to should be selected.

 

Isolate it (right click, isolate), then work on fixing it up.

 

It's pretty bad that your "co-workers" won't stop the sloppy practice.

[mattclinch]

not sure if you mean that they are modelling with lots of objects that have coplanar faces, or the geometry of their single objects is poor and contains coplanar faces, but heres a few scripts that always help me with this kind of problem-

 

find coinstances - http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/find-coinstances

deletedoublefaces 4 - http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/deletedoublefaces-0

[jafs00]

thank you all for your replies, but especially thanks to you, Matt, these are the things I was looking for, I think.

 

Manually selecting and erasing the polygons would have been too much work.

 

I`m going to try them out and, I'll tell you guys how it worked out.

[BrianKitts]

the scripts look like useful tools to hold on to. However I have a feeling that they only work on duplicate geometry where all vertexes of a single object have identical positions. (maybe I'm wrong) It might not work for two objects that don't completely lineup but have coincident faces.

 

One trick that I do sometimes is to switch my graphics mode in max over to software mode, and fly though the scene with the walkthrough tool in shaded mode. At certain distances it causes some of the overlapping faces to flash in the viewport. It helps to search them out and be able to delete them. Comes in real handy when you are importing full city meshes from google earth because it brings in a lot of doubles.

 

The best way to handle your situation is to just explain to your new emplyer how the quality of your work stems from proper modeling and that you can make use out of other peoples models, it just takes more work than just lighting and texturing. Just make sure you word it carefully so you come of as being good at what you do, and not condescending to those who did the sloppy models.

[jafs00]

Well, just like Brian said, the scripts didn't help me much.

 

It's a bad thing to miss a deadline, good thing for me I pulled an all nighter modeled it from scratch and finished a so/so render which the clients loved, so blame was divided evenly amongst us modelers and renderers.

 

Lesson learned and the other guys are cleaning up their act so this never happens again.

 

thanks for your advice Brian and just answer this question for me, .. Does that dog blink or am I developing some sort of psychotic hallucination from lack of sleep?

[BrianKitts]

I'd get some sleep dude.....

[Q-Bix]

Thanks for the duplicate face remover that has just saved me about 2/3 hours work.

 

I had an object with 120,000 duplicate faces! doing that manually would have really spoilt my day!