Hello everyone,
I am sorry if it’s the wrong place to post but I am totally out of options. After hours of googling I decided to ask for help here.
I am making a model of the Titanic and I am planning on animating it a little bit (collision with the Iceberg and sinking). When it hits the Iceberg, I want it to split into two pieces. The splitting part I managed to do but there is still a hole on both pieces. I to fill the hole on one side fairly simply, but the other side just would not work. ‘Append to Polygon’ tool seems to be nonoperational as I cannot do anything with it. Just using extrude is not an option because the border has many edges and it has to perfectly fit the other side.
Tried deleting history, merging border vertexes and edges - nothing seems to be working.
So I am asking for your help.
The scene file can be downloaded here:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=02JXM0W1

Thank you very much! You’re amazing! It worked like a charm ^^

artee 11 January 2012 03:34 AM

It worked like a charm ^^

I’m glad to hear it. 

One of the best ways to figure out what’s going on with a polygon mesh is to use the “Mesh Component Display” options in the Attribute Editor.

Select the object, open the Attribute Editor, make sure that the Shape tab is active instead of the transform (it says “mesh:” next to the node’s name).

In the “Component Display” section, the first two things I try are “Display Borders” with the value set to 4 or 5, and “Display Normal”.

This will show you if you have un-merged vertices, because you’ll have border edges where you don’t expect them.

The normals display can show you that you have lamina faces (normals pointing in both directions from a single face, usually), or neighboring faces that have normals in opposite directions (which will prevent their neighboring edges from looking smooth)

After that, I run Mesh->Cleanup… to highlight and fix problems.

tkaap 11 January 2012 03:47 AM

artee 11 January 2012 03:34 AM

It worked like a charm ^^

I’m glad to hear it. 

One of the best ways to figure out what’s going on with a polygon mesh is to use the “Mesh Component Display” options in the Attribute Editor.

Select the object, open the Attribute Editor, make sure that the Shape tab is active instead of the transform (it says “mesh:” next to the node’s name).

In the “Component Display” section, the first two things I try are “Display Borders” with the value set to 4 or 5, and “Display Normal”.

This will show you if you have un-merged vertices, because you’ll have border edges where you don’t expect them.

The normals display can show you that you have lamina faces (normals pointing in both directions from a single face, usually), or neighboring faces that have normals in opposite directions (which will prevent their neighboring edges from looking smooth)

After that, I run Mesh->Cleanup… to highlight and fix problems.

Ok, so before doing the Cleanup, none of my borders were ‘highlited’ (the width was default) but after the cleanup the width of borders became 4 (I set that below “Display Borders” option) which means exactly what? That none of the borders were actually real? :)
I;m just a beginner so I’m sometimes still finding it hard to understand the effects of one operation or another.

artee 11 January 2012 04:00 AM

Ok, so before doing the Cleanup, none of my borders were ‘highlited’ (the width was default) but after the cleanup the width of borders became 4 (I set that below “Display Borders” option) which means exactly what? That none of the borders were actually real? :)

It’s confusing even when you’re not a beginner.  Lamina faces cause all kinds of confusion.

Before you do the cleanup, the edges aren’t borders.  Border edges are edges that only touch one face.  The lamina faces share all of their edges with each other, so each edge touches two faces, even though the faces appear identical when you look at them.  After the cleanup, when the lamina faces are removed, then the edges only touch a single face, so they get highlighted as borders.

Another good test for situations like this is to click-select (not drag-select) a single vertex, then use the move tool to move it somewhere away from its original position.  If only one face’s corner moves with the vertex, you know the vertex isn’t merged (then the hunt begins for the reason why).  Then use ‘undo’ to move it back into place.

For your initial model, a single corner will move, but the edges won’t be highlighted as borders.  This is usually a sure sign of lamina faces.