Request Advice for Modeling a Table with a Drawer (Solved, I think)

Inkubo

In Blender I'm trying to model a nice, curvy table that has a drawer. I like what I have there. But when I load it into DAZ Studio and convert to SubD for good smoothing, the drawer's face and its opening warp and deform all to heck. The result is terrible.

I guess the first question to ask is: Should SubD be avoided for hard-surface modeling, even when you want the furniture to be curved?

The first thing I thought to try was to use the Geometry Editor to increase the Edge Weight of edges that define the drawer's outline and the table's opening. Selecting the edges around the opening was easy, but I couldn't get to the edges for the drawer. So I selected the entire table and chose "Hide Selected Geometry" so I could see the drawer. When you're selecting a subdivided item, the cursor reacts to where faces and edges truly are in the unsubdivided model, not where they are drawn on the screen, so I had a devil of a time selecting anything until it occurred to me to set the subdivision level down to 0. Then I selected the desired edges and set their weights to 10. Now I'd like to unhide everything and see how it renders, but I just can't discover how to unhide faces once they've been hidden with the Geometry Editor. My Google-fu isn't working today: any search term including DAZ Geometry Editor gets tons of hits on pirate sites but nothing apparently useful, and as you can imagine, even though good instructions probably exist somewhere in DAZ's documentation, I'm not able to find them.

So: how in the world do you unhide faces you've hidden in the Geometry Editor?

I have attached a pic of the model in Blender. You can see, the drawer's face is very wide and thin.

jestmart

Can't really tell since you didn't use wire shaded view but I would say you don't have enough edge loops.

Richard Haseltine

Try adjusting the Edge Interpolation setting, in the Parameters pane's Editor tab under Mesh Resolution. You could also use edge weights to control the smoothing.

Inkubo

My most immediate problem is that after making Edge Weight adjustments with geometry hidden (in order to be able to select the drawer face's edges), I can't see the result of my changes because I can't figure out how to unhide the geometry.

Richard Haseltine

Should be right-click>Geometry Visibility>Show All Polygons

Inkubo

I wasn't seeing Geometry Visibility in the right-click menu. But I just found out why: I've been in edge-selection mode in order to select edges in order to change their weights. You don't get the visibility menu unless you are in polygon selection mode.

Inkubo

I think I'm barking up the wrong tree. From what I can tell by examining other creators' models, SubD just isn't used on furniture with drawers. Looks like I need to do all my subdivision and smoothing in Blender, which means more edge loops, just like jestmart suggested.