Hey everyone! I have the opportunity to design a climbing gym, I am a residential performance home designer, and recently I got the opportunity to design a climbing gym as climbing is a big part of my life as well.
I have been trying many, many options, for example, sub d, skimp, quad face tools, artisan, vertex tools, some of / mostly the best plugins available for quad modelling, I’ve tried all kinds of modelling techniques, simple in the beginning, detailed in the beginning and trying to clean up geometry after, etc. I am sharing now my best workflow I’ve found for creating a climbing wall, however this applies to basically anyone trying to make a complex mesh that is clean and has little triangulation, this is particularly for people looking to have mainly planar quads in their mesh and keep things simple.
In the video I illustrate the problems with starting with too much complexity and than attempting to make certain key areas planar, since this result ends up effecting all surrounding stick geometry and your left with a constant fight to clean up the geometry. Overall I recommend to follow the tips in the video and start clean and start simple, do 1 section at a time, it can all be connected that’s fine, but do chunks of sections at a time and move onto the next. This way you’ll have a very clean model and as things develop and you know more and more what you want, you can always add on complexity after to the model and you also have the ease of changes while geometry still remains clean. One thing that comes to mind is how maybe you finish the entire deisgn and at the end you want to change quite random sections throughout, by doing this, you will end up distorting nearby geometry, one way to avoid this if you want surrounding geometry to stay exactly how it is, would be to split the geometry using a intersect with plane native method or make the object a group and use s4u cut tool, the detach tool and seperate the geometry, than right beside it you could simply model what you want and how you envision it to connect and than follow the methods I show in the video for connectin the two geometries or sections together.
In the beginning I started using too much complexity and than I tried using a tool like cadman mesh wrapper, mesh wrapper will still bring in tri geometry, not planar quads, so it’s best to start simple and do things in sections and keep as much as possible as quads if planar quads are your intention.
I hope this is really useful for some, I might even come back here and look this up again to remember how I did this down the road haha.
Enjoy: