From the course: Blender and Substance Painter: Architectural Visualization

Fixing smoothing errors

From the course: Blender and Substance Painter: Architectural Visualization

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Fixing smoothing errors

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- Now, one thing you have to watch out for when creating an object like this are smoothing errors. And from here, this looks pretty good. But if we tumble around down here you can see, look at this, it's got these things that kind of look like creases. And if we tab into edit mode you can see we've got this long polygon here ending with this ngon this multi-sided polygon. It isn't a three-sided polygon, a tri. It isn't a four-sided polygon, a quad, it's an ngon, more than four sides here. And that can lead to problems if you've got something like this long polygon leading up to it. So we could tumble around here and then we could maybe click and drag on the auto smooth here and see what we could come up with. And it turns out that it just stays there. There isn't anything we can do. We can go all the way down and take the smoothing completely off. But as soon as we give it any smoothing at all, it comes back. So how do we fix something like this? Well, oftentimes you've got to just add a few edges here and there. Maybe even redistribute the geometry to smooth that out again. So I think if we tab into edit mode and take a look at this, if the problem is that we're coming into this area with a long polygon and ending that polygon with multiple angles, in other words, this long polygon currently is an ngon, right? It's got more than four sides because of this area here. What if we made this a four-sided polygon so it didn't extend all the way to this area. Let's give that a try. To do that we can't really just insert edge loops. If I tried to say, press Ctrl+R and hover over any of these areas in here, I can't insert an edge loop into these because there are more than four sides and we can only insert edge loops into four-sided polygons. So what we're going to have to do is cut them in, kind of draw them in ourselves. I'm going to go to vertex mode and the tool we can use is the knife tool. To get to the knife tool you just press the K key. So I'll press K and then I'll just come over here and hover over a point, click, and then hover over another point and click, and then I'll hit the enter key and that draws a new edge or cuts it in with the knife tool. I'll press K again and click here, click here and hit enter. K and snap to that point and click and snap to that point and hit enter, and just do this all the way around like this. There we go. So now you can see this face, this long polygon is now a quad. So let's tab back into object mode and see how we've done. Well, we've cleaned up this edge pretty well. There isn't that indentation there. There's still a little of a problem going on in here, you can see at the corners. So let's see what we can do with that. For this, once again, you've got a polygon terminating in multiple sides, and I think adding another edge loop through here might be beneficial. So if we press Ctrl+R though, we can see that we can only insert the edge loops through these four-sided polygons. We can't really get them all the way around. Now we could add one here and here. Oops, here, there we go. And here and here and then use the knife tool to connect these up. But there's another way that we can do this. If we say go to edge mode and select this whole edge, it's already selected actually, but if it isn't, you can always press alt and click and select that whole edge. Now to add one more edge here we can use our bevel tool. So to do that let's just press Ctrl+B and pull out. And there we go. Now you can scroll the mouse wheel and add a lot more edges, but I don't think we need to do that. We just need to add one more edge right in here. So then I'll click and there we go. Now, if we tab back into object mode, it's looking quite a bit cleaner. Now there's still maybe a tad bit of an issue here on the corner. And that's something that we might be able to come over here and click and drag and sure enough I think with the auto smooth tool over here, we can clean that up a bit. There we go. Yeah. I think that looks a lot better. So sometimes depending on the structure of your polygons, you may need to go in and reorganize or add an edge here or there just to clean up any smoothing errors on the object. All right, well, we're getting to the point where I think we can begin working on the furniture of our coworking space here. Now, granted here in the kitchen there's a lot we can do with creating the faucet for the sink here. We'll probably want to create this coffee maker, but I think there's some other pieces of furniture I'd like to begin with first. So in the next part of the course we'll begin working on that.

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