Lesson 3: "Ghostbusters" or "How you clean up easier than you do it right now"

 

Well then, this mysterious lesson doesn't tell you how to clean up your room, if it's that what you expected...

Well, the next problem all TA modelers got to face is: How do i get rid of all these polygons/faces that I really don't need? You learned in the last theory lesson where most of these faces are...now we'll see how we clean these messy faces:

Load your model. I'll show you everything with a simple example-model: "The cubic football" (You would know that one if you read the theory lesson B...:) )

First, you selct your whole model. Maybe the command bar shows up "*number* polygon meshes selected". These aren't the faces, these are cubes. To make you able to select single (sur-)faces, we'll again need...

- The "Mesh"-button

Left-click: make a polygonal mesh out of a NURBS object.

Right-click: "Explode" a poly mesh into single faces.

This time you got to RIGHT-click it while your model is selected. Now you can select the useless faces you might have noticed:

I selected 2 invisible faces inside my "Cubic-football"

This is what my command line shows: First I exploded 3 cubes into 6 parts (single faces here) and then selected 2 of them.

Sometimes when making complex models and you explode things, they do not end up as single polygon faces. That's why Rhino always speaks of "parts" or "polygon meshes". Because we model the clean TA way, we need to and are able to edit single faces like this.

You select the faces not visible and press del to delete them.

If you're still not sure what invisible faces are, or where your model has got invisible faces, try using:

n to see your model and to delete all faces that you won't see/miss when looking at the shaded model. The undo command healps you if you done something wrong

- The "Shade"-button

Left-click: Shade currently active viewport..

Right-click: Shade all viewports.

n to see your model and to delete all faces that you won't see/miss when looking at the shaded model. The undo command healps you if you done something wrong.

 

Okay, I guess you've tried to do it as I said, but it doesn't matter for your first model if you didn't. Cleaning a model is a skill that appears suddenly and improves over time. :)

But now I can hear you say: "Hey, now I got a terrible mess of faces and cannot select parts of my model well, nor edit the points good now!" Then I'll teach you how you "glue them together" again. This is also incredibly important for a process called exporting, but I'll explain that to you the next lesson. Well, now we'll put your model together again.

Don't select the whole model, but select a group of faces you want to select seperately. Then, if you did lesson 1 well, you can simply press

F4 (joinmesh command)

to join the faces together.

Good to be joined together as seperate parts are for example the wings and the body for an airplane, or the body, turret and barrel for a tank. Maybe I used the wrong explanation: When joined together, Rhino counts them as one object that you can select with a single click. And if you activate the edit points, points will appear for the whole object. But joining together the whole model is uncomfortable. And bad for exporting. Well, it's better you try it than to listen to my bad explanations, okay? And then...

 

Click here to advance to the next lesson!

Click here to jump to lesson 4 without the theory crap!