Gander0 Posted February 17, 2009 Share Posted February 17, 2009 Does anyone know how i might subdivde a selected polygon automatically with out subdiving the whole mesh. I dont want to have to cut it up manually. An exampe is creating an organic shape spline in top view > extruding > converting to editable poly> Now the top and bottom of the extrusion will be flat undivided sufaces which i would like to subdivide. Any help is much appreciated! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SandmanNinja Posted February 17, 2009 Share Posted February 17, 2009 Tessellate? Select the face and hit Tessellate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Horhe Posted February 17, 2009 Share Posted February 17, 2009 (edited) Try selecting the face you want to be subdivided and press 'tesselate' under the 'edit poly' tab. Edit: Sandman Ninja beat me to it Edited February 17, 2009 by Horhe Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gander0 Posted February 17, 2009 Author Share Posted February 17, 2009 Horhe, Sandman, thanks for that. Thats useful but what im really after is something like a subdivide type tool for specific faces. I often run into this issue when I want to poly model an extrusion and thought there might be a tool I have overlooked? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
SandmanNinja Posted February 17, 2009 Share Posted February 17, 2009 I guess I'm misunderstanding. Tesellate will subdivide specific faces - the faces that are selected. You could select the faces of a particular smoothing group, too. Example: if I have a model that I want to increase the poly count on, giving me more detail in that particular area, I'd just select them and tessellate. Sorry if I am misunderstanding Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gander0 Posted February 17, 2009 Author Share Posted February 17, 2009 Thanks again SandmanNinja. When I use tesselate, the face gets divided up with a single point in the centre and all polygon lines radiating from this. What would be good, is if I would be able to divide the face up more intuitively, like the subdivide modeller does, or divide the face as close as possible to a grid. I think im asking a bit too much now and am guessing guessing tesselate will be a close as it gets. Ive just done a quick couple of tests and if i cut my shape first tesselate acts a bit more like what i would like. Many thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stephen Thomas Posted February 17, 2009 Share Posted February 17, 2009 Just choose the edge mode rather than face and keep hitting apply to get a denser grid. Not sure what you're after that you can't achieve this way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter M. Gruhn Posted February 17, 2009 Share Posted February 17, 2009 For changing the mode on tesselate, click the little dialog button next to the tesselate button. Don't have time to check, but I think he'll only get the nice grid if his original polys are nice quads. There may be a script out there that does what you want, but... There may not be because people who write scripts are the people who have the experience and experience tends to lead people away from indiscriminately gridding things off. More so in the poly model and a turbo smooth world but still, I think, in general. One thing you may find helpful but I'm not so sure, is the inset tool which does a different kind of subdivision but not the pretty grid and it can make messes quickly. I think you are going to have to do some sort of manual labor. I've been using a lot more cut tool recently but if possible edge selection and connect. Depending on your geometry, that may be a solution for you, but I'm guessing yours is multisided and/or holed etc. In which case it may not. If it were quad, select two opposite edges, connect with n lines. Select the other two edges and the new lines and connect again. Boom, grid across the quad. Say it's five sided not four and it gets fussier. Say its oblong and tapered, it gets fussier. If you've got the time and want to get in to it, you might post an image (with edges on) of a representative sample, maybe scribble on top in red what you want to do. BECAUSE... I suspect you may want some pointers on how to approach the modelling differently. I could be wrong. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Gander0 Posted February 21, 2009 Author Share Posted February 21, 2009 Thanks again for the replies, Peter, its not a specific problem for a job that I cant solve, its just something i run into from time to time and ive finally got round to asking the question. I dont normaly poly model from an extruded spline its but this time it came up. Imagine a extruded kidney bean shape and how tesselate would treat the top face. As you said tesselate is better when the original polys are nice quads. I think a bit of manual labour might be best in this case! Cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Peter M. Gruhn Posted February 21, 2009 Share Posted February 21, 2009 Something like the kidney my current (and no doubt soon to change ;-) thinking would be to not cap the extrusion. Poly, boundary, select the top then shift scale it in. Eventually it will start overlapping and you'll have to start welding. But you'll get nice flow from the sides to the top and a top face "tesselation" that makes better sense based on the edge verts. And in the end you'll just have to draw some final polys or bridge some edges. Should work best with perfect circles and get worse the more extreme the kidney. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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