noob question for blender!

hi im new to modeling in blender and just imported a new addon for a character into blender from another modeling application and am looking to fix a hard edge that breaks smooth shading. i have already combined the meshes but am looking on getting rid of the hard edge. is there any way to join the vertices in edit mode? i recalculated normals and looked through the blender forums and found: use ctrl + j, everywhere i went. would the objects importing as separate instances affect this too?

thanks in advance.

 

A photo of it may help us better understand, every case is different...

 

I assume there are also a blender community? While they can't be as awesome as us, they might be able to provide more specific guidance.

 

Select the mesh, press W and choose "remove doubles"

 

Blender community is not very useful. If the op posts a picture, it will be easier to give some advice.

In general one possible problem is that blender doesn't have smoothing groups. It is either shade smooth /flat or edge split modifier.

Either way. To merge multiple vertices, select them, then press alt+m, then select an option from the menu that shows up.

 

hello everyone, here are some pics. i scrapped the original idea and am adding some customization options to a pet character but am presented with the same problem. image 1 and 2 are with nothing done, 3 and 4 are with doubles removed, 5 is selected by pressing L while hovering over, more below on this. merging the edges / vertex doesn't work very well > it causes massive distortion. there is a little bit of extra geometry on the front sides but im not worried about that yet and will remove it later. the modeling application that i imported from is sketchup, i had them set up as components so i could do non destructive editing > it seems to have translated over to blender because i can hover and press L and it will select what i had put in as a component in sketchup and i can move it without distorting the base mesh (image 5). without further ado here are the images!

 

Fill in the gap between the two manually.

 

You need to stitch ears to the head if you want to have no gaps.

Blender doesn't do "non-destructive" workflow well, and excels at destructive one.

Due to the way blender works with normals, splitting ears into separate component should be probably done on unity side within assetpostprocessor script or something like that. To do that you'll need to assign a different material to ears, which will make them available as a different submesh after import.

 

I'm sure blender has a boolean operation as well doesn't it? This basic modeling technique has been around since - ever so I'm sure it has it. Although - the blender users above probably have better suggestions, and boolean operations are usually a bit messy and require cleaning up - it gets the job done when needed.

Another does it? Does blender have a bridging operation? Where two separate mesh elements are bridged by polygons and then can be massaged into conformity?

 

Yes Blender has both. Boolean tools and a bridge operation.

 

Blender does have a boolean operation, but it is not very convenient and may glitch out. I don't ever use it.

I'm not aware of such operation. It might exist. Also see:
https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/34324/how-do-i-stick-an-object-to-another-objects-vertex

And there's bridge operation that works in mesh edit mode, when objects are already joined:
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Modeling/Bridge

Any examples? AFAIK, theANIMATOR2b wants to keep objects separate. Without Ctrl+J-ing them first.

 

I don't think that is what he meant. And this isn't really possible without editing the mesh itself.

What boolean operation do you mean? The boolean modifier? I never had a problem with it and with Blender 2.78, it got an nice overhaul and new options.

 

Sorry guys, and thanks for the info. I was just attempting to offer 'other' solutions to OP.
The great thing about booleans is they are robust and simple. In OP case - could teach him a little about mesh manipulation and 'how' stuff works rather than "what button do I click".
In Max booleans can be performed on separate object, and can combine the result, keep it separate from the A/B operands while retaining A/B or replacing etc etc. Booleans results have always been kinda messy in Max until they swallowed Proboolean company and incorporated it into Max. But I'd been working with Max for 10+ years at that point so - just used to performing the messy boolean operations and cleaning up manually.

 

Overhaul or not, I had it glitch out on overlapping shapes in 2.78 as well. In general I simply don't use it.

 

Booleans definitely can be really useful. Interesting how Max this handles. Blender's booleans are pretty robust, but like in Max, you often have to clean your mesh afterwards.

 

I think a good software to take a look at when it comes to booleans is autodesk fusion 360. Those guys took the whole "parametric modeling" to eleven.

This is a completely different paradigm compared to max and blender though.

 

I'm no expert...but I can say, if you have separate materials for 2 parts of the same mesh, they get drawn separately in Unity, and therefore the edges get split, even if there is only the single edge...and therefore, you get a hard edge instead of smoothing. If I'm not mistaken, Blender recently got some way to directly modify normals(which might help), but I'm not sure on that one.

Another thing to say...Blender doesn't have smoothing groups. But, you can easily mark your edges sharp, and then make the whole model smooth. Then, you can apply the edge split modifier to only work with sharp marked edges instead of being angle based, or you could work with a combination of those.

About Blender boolean modelling...I've never used it on something that animates, as you need better geometry than for static models, and I find it easier to just model it directly than cleanup after the boolean operation. But for static meshes, where the geo doesn't have to be clean, it can be useful. And yes, Blender does have a bridge tool, though to get use out of it you need to have both edge loops have the same amount of verts.

 

hello everyone! thanks for sharing your knowledge with me, i finally have some time off work this coming week and am looking forward to "attempting" (failing) to learn something new in blender. i can uv map, animate and some other stuff but i cant wrap my head around the mesh tools part, or the boolean operator? i found it but it doesn't seem to work? does the two meshes have to be separate?

EDIT: found out how to use it. but it seems to do a bit too much damage

 

If you're trying to attach the ears, to the round head thingy, one best way to do
that would be to go into edit mode and manually attach the vertices, from the
ear object, to the head object.

I do mesh combining stuff like this, all the time.
But unfortunately, my pc is down for now. So I can't help any further.

 

I hope that you didn't have, a subdivision modifier added to it. Otherwise, you might sometimes encounter, a few buggy problems with the boolean modifier.

The best thing to do, is to first, apply the subdivision modifier, to the objects. Then use the boolean ability.

Note: But yeah, the boolean ability in blender, does sometimes mess up a bit. But I remember that they fixed it, and it works much better, in recent versions of blender.