MESHWEAVER - Mesh Tidying

Right you've finished your mesh now comes the tidying up! No matter how careful we are in constructing our mesh certain errors always pop up during construction that are overlooked and might cause problems later. I'm aiming to provide some general guidelines for construction and some tips for tidying up - these tips are also extremely handy when handling Conversion from other file formats. First I will deal with the Point Multiplication Problem. As we all know Point numbers are a limiting factor of all the earlier versions of LightWave - only now in Version 6 and above has it been done away with. A common problem I have seen people face is this one. They have made a tube with various sections that are raised, they still want sharp definition of the edges of these sections; but with a smoothing angle of 89.5 degrees (LightWave's default) which is usually used for tubes we get this result:

Now the most common technique I have seen used to eliminate this problem it to cut out the offending section and then paste it back in again like so

Now with that out of the way - which will help you out a lot in the long run believe me....first we move onto tidying up the final construction. You can either do these steps on the whole mesh if it is a relatively small one or section by section for large complicated meshes.

Next Section by Section - or ideally Surface by Surface; select the surface in question and then run the Points Merge Macro [to eliminate the points problem as discussed before] followed by a Surface Smoothing Check as discussed before - [this is something that you will commonly have to do when undergoing a conversion.] Then run the Reduce Polygons macro, be careful with the reduce polygons function as sometimes on a complex surface the result can be less than good and polygon tearing will occur - and I've found more often than not the surfaces that are lumpy and bumpy tend to not like this macro at all -- so be careful with it -- if it doesn't turn out well then just undo and leave it as is.

Now sometimes with reduce poly functions, point merge, point weld - and other functions you will be left with poly's that consist of either one or two vertices - these are for all intents and purposes useless and should be selected and then cut away - they do have their uses such as hair with a medium or large polygon line size in layout for instance; but in the general scheme of things just get rid of the little things!

Now the simplest way to get rid of a non planar poly is to triple it

leaving this result - all well and done!

- but sometimes it can leave you with loads of little triangular polygons - especially around multi point windows

The trick here is to select polygons wisely and run the merge polygon macro then check for non planar again - if any - triple and repeat - you'll end up with a nice poly layout in the problem area with no non-planar polygons.

An important thing to bear in mind is that Layout can cope with non-planar quite happily sometimes - so check in a render and animation first to see which are the real problem areas and then rectify just them if necessary.

Last thing to do now is to check that there are no polygons that coexist exactly in the same place - these are a nightmare for the render engine - do it by simply pressing the unify button - this tool will find the offending polygons and delete them. - easy eh?