I’m looking to find the best workflow I can to make quad geometry that is truly planar, not this half and half thing where a quad is made up of two triangles that can be in different planes, I don’t want that for this. I need flat planar quads as one surface…
I will attach a video example illustrating my problem however for a brief summary, I’m wondering if anyone could share with me the best tips or plugins I could use to make complex meshes simplified and planar in the areas I want. I can use the mesh wrapper tool which cleans up and simplifies my geometry however it brings in quads that are not planar and instead two triangles on slightly different planes. I tried curviloft, sub d, artisan, skimp, quad face tools, vertex tools 2, etc. There seems to be no plugin that truly makes a mesh around something of truly planar quads, I haven’t found one… So how would I best do this manually? I could create faces manually by using inferencing, however I’m just wondering if theres a better way, you can also see in the video that I show the issue of making faces planlar, the surrounding geometry will become out of plane when one thing becomes in plane because one thing effects the other, so I feel like manual drawing is maybe the only best way??? Any clever ideas? I’m sure this post will help a lot of people out if I can get some good feedback.
Thanks Mihai! I appreciate your feedback! I read this post last night but not much of it, I’m starting to read all of it now and already learning some interesting things. I think there is no easy way to make a face planar without effecting everything else, there has to be compensation made and little progress at a time, was wondering if anyone had also any clever ideas, if you can think of any, let me know, would love to hear about it. Thanks!
Finding your post quite interesting. My carpenter brain has switched into overdrive. Wondering exactly how this “climbing wall” is to be constructed ? What type of framing " How it’s skinned and what the final finish is ? Going to keep my thoughts on this to myself until I have more info…
An amazing plugin would be one that takes the entire mesh, calculates each quad and makes each quad planar in the position it is in, this would not effect the mesh much than and it would give me a great starting point to manually draw in and clean up the non planar quads to be totally planar. I’m finding that the solutions are I start drawing manually or I clean up and finish manually to make all faces planar. I like to start with vertex tools 2 though to get the concept and than I need a good way to finish the mesh and clean it up so I’ve been using skimp to start simplifiying it to be more useable, than I use a mesh wrapper by cadman and than I do some manual drawing and inferencing to get all shapes to be planar. I wonder if there is a better way though…
Cool!! Thanks! The final finish should be planar faces ideally and as few as possible for easy construction. I just shared my process above this comment before I saw your comment, what do you think about it, do you have a better method maybe?
Asked about how it was to be constructed ,framing etc… because I’ve seen a number of climbing walls built. They were made around a central metal superstructure and the irregular shape was formed with rebar. After covering the rebar with fine metal mesh they used" shotcrete" to create the final shape. The “sockets” for the handholds/toe holds were placed prior to “shotcrete” and secured to the rebar structure.
Very curious how yours is intended to be constructed before “throwing” out any ideas…
Oh yea, I am a designer but did 10 years of carpentry, fortunately did get to make a world class climbing gym in Squamish here in Canada when I was a carpenter, in that gym all the walls were actually curves too which is very unique for a climbing gym, in that case we created the walls with 2 layers of 3/4" ply and than wrapped it with ply to create the curves using glue and heavy duty fasteners from a metal nail gun. The final method though in this case should be flat faces, not looking for construction advice on this one, just purely modelling methods for the best way to get clean quads…
Oh yea ok. Yea more or less that’s one method for curved walls, otherwise it’s straight forward for planar faces where the metal bar grid (looks like big tv mounting bars) fasten to the ply system and they get stitched together at the back of wall as well, few more methods in there. Something like that though.
Hey everyone, I’ve just made a post sharing my workflow with people on quad type creation and simple geometry. I hope you enjoy it, was a heck of a time learning all that I did trying to get to this point. Thanks for everyones help on this. This topic can be closed now. You can see my workflow here if you’re interested.
