I’ve gotten pretty good with poly modeling lately and use it a lot. However, I’ve run across a situation that is eluding me. I’m looking for a good technique to reduce the number of rows I have so I can keep quads all the way through.

See my attached image but what I have are teeth and gums. I ‘turbo smoothed’ both with different settings to try to get as close to the same density as possible but you can see that in this one side I have a lot of rows/columns on the tan tooth and fewer in the pinkish gum area. I need to reduce the side of the tan tooth down so that by the time I get to the gum line I have the same number of rows of quads.

I’ve been working on a technique for two days and can’t figure out a good way to do it. I keep getting lots of 5-sided polys. Maybe there isn’t a way to turn 15 rows into 5 rows so I have a nice clean mesh but if anyone has a good technique I’d really like to hear about it.

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Windows 7 Professional x64 - Asus P9X79 Pro - Intel i7-3960 Extreme - 16GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 - Corsair H80 Chiller - Nvidia Quadro 4000 - 3D Studio (preMax) thru Max 2013 Design

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Sorry if I misunderstand your question, but why did you want to combine those 2 objects?..why don’t just let it float like what you have right now?..

_Revel

3ds Max 2011 x64
Windows 7 Home Premium x64
Core 2 Quad Q8400 2.66GHz
nVidia GeForce GTX 275
8.00 GB RAM

This is as much a typical sample as it is an immediate need. I do a lot of dental models and haven’t always built them. I’m frequently cutting someone else’s up and recombining them. It’s common that I need to join models with different mesh densities so I can turbosmooth them and then frequently use a shell modifier. If I don’t have a great mesh the shell won’t perform well at sharp corners. Dental models have a lot of sharp corners where the teeth enter the gingiva (gums). Also, with a clean quad topology you get a cleaner separation of material ID’s and get clean lines of separation between them instead of peaks and corners in that line of separation.

So, it doesn’t really matter why I want to do it as much as, if someone wanted to do this, what’s a good technique? I’m not looking for an alternative or a workaround or a different approach. I’m looking for an inspired way to do something exactly as I explain because it increases my skills at working with polys and will help me produce a better model to suit my specific needs faster.

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Windows 7 Professional x64 - Asus P9X79 Pro - Intel i7-3960 Extreme - 16GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 - Corsair H80 Chiller - Nvidia Quadro 4000 - 3D Studio (preMax) thru Max 2013 Design

You will need to either remove some edges from your tooth or add some edges to the gums so that they match up when the turbosmooth modifier is applied. Using a helper like points you can then align them. The common workflow would be to create the tooth and gum as 1 object then detatch them when required this way you will always have them meeting at the seams.

I apologise for the crude tooth & gum example :)

website: http://www.all3dmax.com

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Blakestone,

Thanks for the input and taking the time to experiment and capture. Yep, that’s a good tried and true workflow and one that I use. However, I frequently don’t have the luxury of building the initial models. I have to work with what’s delivered to me. That’s why I posted. I was wondering if anyone had worked out a good way to reduce the density down without adding extra geometry or unnecessary edges.

There are some common tricks for getting rid of 3-sided and 5-sided polys. I was just looking for some inspired trick that would do specifically what I was asking about.

For example. In the image attached the left-hand cylinder has exactly twice the number of polys on the top half. It’s pretty neat and clean when you reduce it. The right-hand cylinder has an odd number of polys compared to the bottom half. So some of the polys on the bottom have 2 coming to it, some have three and some have 4 coming to each poly in the bottom columns. Reducing this down quickly gets messy and confusing. When turbosmoothed it’s not pretty.

This a great brain teaser. You could even call it a puzzle. There must be some mathematician out there who finds this an interesting challenge. How to reduce ‘x’ number of columns to ‘y’ number of columns and have ‘ALL’ quads with no tris or pentagons. Sure, I can remodel the meshes I’m given and spend hours removing, moving and reorganizing mesh elements. I was just tapping the brain-trust to see if anyone had come up with some really slick way to do this.

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Windows 7 Professional x64 - Asus P9X79 Pro - Intel i7-3960 Extreme - 16GB Kingston HyperX DDR3 1600 - Corsair H80 Chiller - Nvidia Quadro 4000 - 3D Studio (preMax) thru Max 2013 Design

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RobH2 23 June 2010 09:25 PM

How to reduce ‘x’ number of columns to ‘y’ number of columns and have ‘ALL’ quads with no tris or pentagons.

Surely that’s impossible. If one row has fewer vertices than the last, some or all of the polygons must have fewer vertices at one end than at the other. You’re bound to end up with triangles.

A rather crude example of getting 3 columns down to 1 column with 1 column as a spacer to reduce the poles at the end (5 pole instead of 6) and also 1 where 3 columns are reduced to 1 (but has 6 poles)

Digital Entertainment Creation Suite 2010, 2011, 2012

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I think this might be a better solution, it goes from 4 to 2 columns and uses a single 5 pole

Digital Entertainment Creation Suite 2010, 2011, 2012

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Poles can be a problem for sculpting (mudbox & zbrush) which is why you reduce the number of them and try to keep them in an area where you are not going to do lots of sculpting. Kites can suffer the same problem with scuplting.

Digital Entertainment Creation Suite 2010, 2011, 2012