[3DS MAX] Cleaning a mesh and making it highpoly

[IVMyLife]

Hello, this is a tutorial for 3DS Max where i'll show you how to adding easly poligons to a mesh exported from GTA.

This method pretty much works for every triangulated model, the point of this tutorial is about converting the mesh from tris to quads, to having proper smoothing when the mesh have a meshsmooth/turbosmooth modifier on it.

 

So what I'll show in this tutorials is:

 

-Weld verticies, since after exportion of a DFF the mesh will be "unwelded" based on the UV Islands.

-Cleaning tris and making it in quads.

-Adding supporting loops and subdivide the mesh.

 

For the tutorials purposes, i'll work on the Jester exhausts, but works for every kind of mesh, like the tyres or even the whole car.

 

1) This is "easier" part of the tutorial (not that the whole process is hard thought), and it's about welding the verticies.

Just convert the mesh to editable poly, select all the verticies and weld to a point.

For welding, we have to find the "Weld" button on the editable poly tab.

 

then we click the button on the right of the "weld" button.

 

A new window will appear, and, it's the weld settings.

So far, if we keep the settings as max standards, we won't have the result we want.

 

 

So what we have to do, is to put a value of 0,01, so it will weld only the verticies that are near between them, so for making the mesh in one piece and not anymore divided like the UV Islands.

 

 

After we welded the mesh, finally we can start cleaning the triangles from the mesh, so we can make it in Quads.

 

Converting the mesh from tris to quad

Before starting this part, I want to point something out for who is new in modeling.

Every game engine supports only triangles, and not quads, that's why everytime a mesh is exported in game supported formats, such as fbx or even DFF, it automaticly converts the quads to triangles.

A Quad face have only 1 polygon, when a Tris face will have 2 polygons, but will have same vertex count.

So you guys might ask, so why we should convert our model in quads if it's gonna be again triangulated?

Just because working on triangulated model is not the best choose, especially if we are gonna using something suchs as Mesh Smooth, i'll anyway put a picture later comparing a turbosmoothed quad mesh with a triangulated one.

 

In this pic i'll explain a bit what's the difference between a Quad and a Tris.

 

The quad mesh have 4 verticies but only one face, when the triangulated one have same verticies as quad, so 4, but 2 faces instead.

 

So yeah, the boring part it's over, now we can work finally on the mesh.

 

So we are goin to use edge selection on the editable poly tab, and we will select every triangles.

 

 

 

After we selected all the triangles on the mesh, we can hit the backspace button on our keyboard, and bang! The triangles disappeared.

 

 

We are not done anyway! We still have to make the whole mesh in quads, some parts need some hand-made adjustment, but don't worry i'll explain that aswell.

 

So we will select al those edges and press backspace.

 

 

And using the Cut Tool on the Graphite Modeling Tools (only avaliable on max 2011 and later), we will make a straight edge between the 2 middle verticies of the mesh.

 

 

On this particular mesh, the other side it's already like that, we only have to delete the triangles.

 

 

Now we can do the same for every mesh of the exhaust, such as the pipe and the cylinder.

 

 

Finally, we are done with the cleaning, it's time to make our mesh highpoly.

 

Adding the supporting loops

Turbosmooth and Meshsmooth, pretty much works the same, they smooth the edges and such, so without proper supporting loops we won't have our desidered result.

So if we turbosmooth the mesh right now, without working on the supporting loops, we will have this:

 

 

That's not even near of what we are looking for!

 

First of all, i'd suggest you guys to use the Swift Loop on the Graphite Modeling Tools if using max 2011 or later, otherwhise the connect edges will work the same.

 

After we added all the supporting loops that we can add with the Swift Loop, our mesh will look like that.

 

Now, what im gonna do is select the middle edges.

 

 

And we will use chamfer the edge a bit.

 

 

 

Now, we are gonna use the face selection, and select this face:

 

 

We are gonna use the Inset (inside Graphite Modeling Tools), and we drag the mouse til we have something like this:

 

 

Now we can extrude it, and add another inset after the extrusion.

 

 

Now we will add one last supporting loops, right here.

 

 

Turbosmooth

Well, that's the easier part actually.

Select the mesh and search on the modifier list () "Turbosmooth".

And we will just add as many iterations we want, but note:

It's not always the best choose to use a lot of iterations, we will have a really perfectly smoothed mesh but with a lot of poly, and not proper for a game engine, so i'd suggest for such a small mesh only 1, max 2 iterations.

 

 

So if the smoothing groups are not that smooth, like in this pic:

 

 

We will search on modifier list, the "Smooth" modifier, and we will use one from these.

 

 

Note: for unturbosmoothed mesh i'd suggest to use Auto Smooth with 45,00 threshold, or even better the tool inside TexTools plugins "Smoothing Group from UV Shells", if the mesh have an unwrap.

For this kind of work, (turbosmoothed mesh), is better to only use the Smoothing Groups instead of Auto-Smooth and Smoothing Group from UV Sheels.

 

The End

And it's the end of the tutorials, as I said earlier i'll show some differences between original mesh, turbosmoothed triangulated model and our final result.

 

 

1) Final Result

2) Original Mesh

3) Turbosmoothed triangulated mesh.

 

Hope this tutorial been useful, see ya soon.

[Minhkute360]

Helpful info. But may u also create a tutorial for meshes modifying with Zmodeler?