Hi everyone, I’m having a problem with a basic mesh thats currently got me stumped.
I’m building a coridoor for a space station, and suddenly ran into errors when checking the mesh. Maya is claiming the mesh has some non-manifold geometry (about 2/3rds of the mesh selects on cleanup) Importing the file to mudbox also claims the mesh is full of T-Shapes.

I’ve been over it with a finetoothed comb and I cant see any problems with it, asking Maya to autoclean the mesh just triangulates most of it.

As I wish to take the file into Mudbox later this is a problem, as Mudbox wont subdevide a non manifold mesh.

If anyone can give some insight as to why this is happening I’d be greatful, all I can think of myself is the mesh has some relativly large polygons combined with small ones. I don’t know enough about nonmanifold geometry to work out why this is happening.

Iv’e included the file in .fbx format if anyone would care to take a look.

The sort of thing in this picture is your T-Shape. It won’t go into Mudbox.

Here I made the same sort of construction, but out of cubes instead of planes:

Note I put X-Ray shading on, and the thickness is greater than needed to make the details clearer.

You would not have to have all of the faces of the two cubes in your final mesh, although having a distinct outside and inside is important if anything is going to be visible from both sides. First, if you use two-sided polygons, one side will just be the mirror image of what you texture on the other (text will be backwards, for instance), but also if you try to use the assets in a game, the back side will be invisible in most game engines. With two distinct sides, you can texture each side differently.

Since your picture didn’t get attached, I can only guess at what you are doing. But if the issues are from where a bulkhead attaches to a floor, you can probably duplicate the bulkhead plane and rotate it 180 in Y and offset it slightly, cut the floor twice with Split Polygon and remove a face and merge the vertices together.

To make sure you can tell the back from the front, you can turn “backface culling” on and off in the Shading menu (on the viewport menu) and your polygons will be invisible from the back side.

<* Wes *>