Hexagon novice question -- combining sharp and smoothed edges in an object

katfeete

Hi everyone. I'm a complete newcomer to Hexagon, and am trying to make a hatchet for my first model. This one, to be specific: http://cdn.silodrome.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Kaufmann-Mercantile-Camping-Collection.jpeg

The challenge I'm stuck on is figuring out how to combine the sharp edges with the smooth, rounded curves in the neck. It may be that I'm not correctly building up the model at all...

I was originally going to build the whole thing by using Sweep Surface on a cube and then adjusting the appropriate edges, but ran into the whole smooth/sharp edge issue. Next I tried modelling the head as one object, the neck as a nother, and the grip (much more rounded in this particular hatchet) as a third, and then welding the three. But I soon realized that the neck itself had parts that were smooth curves, which is where I'm stuck at the moment.

I'm pretty sure that breaking the model up further until each object had *just* smooth edges or *just* sharp ones is the hard way of going about this. There must be a way to combine both in an object. Mustn't there?

JoeMamma2000

I guess the answer to your question is "yes". You can do it.

This is most easily done using what are called Subdivision Surfaces. You start with a very simple shape, then apply subdivision to it to get the final smoothed/hi-resolution shape. And the sharpness of the corners are controlled by inserting more lines/edges in the object in that area where you want the sharpness.

Hard to explain...this is a fairly complex model you've chosen to duplicate, and if you really want a nice looking result it's not a quick solution.

Of course you can hack it and do some workarounds if you just need something quickly, but I'd recommend you check out a few videos on working with subdivision surfaces if you want a nice model.

Roygee

For your generosity of sharing your work on ShreCG, I owe you a fuller explanation :)

Normally I would agree that subdivision and cutting in extra edges to harden them would be the way to go. In this model, there are a lot of hard edges, one area of smooth, with transitions between them. The traditional method would soon become pretty messy, unless you are a real adept!

Fortunately Hex has the answer. I won't go into great detail on how I made the basic shape. It started as a cube for the head, which was shaped and a couple of faces extruded for the shaft. The shaft shaped to make it four-sided. The handle is a cylinder, bent and shaped. Extra edges cut into the shaft to match the number of verts at the join between the cylinder and shaft, then attached by welding points.

You can see in the area of the head you marked, that I cut in extra edges to get the curve shaped.

Now for smoothing. If you look in the dynamic geometry panel, you'll see an icon to display smoothing control shape - activate that and it makes a cage around the model when you go to smoothing. Instead of using the normal smoothing in the properties panel, use the one under the surfaces tab.

This gives you a choice of algorithms - stay with Carmull-Clark and select breaks. Set that to 1 (in my pic I had it on 2 by mistake - that gives an unnecessarily dense mesh). Select the edges on the cage you want to keep sharp - see the highlighted edges in my second pic. What this does is exclude the selected edges from smoothing. No need to hold shift as you select, it keeps the selection. To deselect, hover the mouse over an edge, it turns yellow, click to deselect.

Once you are happy, validate and collapse DG. If you aren't happy with the result, simply undo a couple times and select different edges.

Note to Carrara VM fanboys - another whole set of functions Carrara doesn't have :)

Now a question for you - how do you make a dynamic link to your freebies - i'd like to do that for mine:)

EDIT: The pics are displayed in the wrong order - should be bottom one first, top one second and middle one last.

m_m_italy

Ottimo "Roy"!
:-)

zlotnikov

Thank you JoeMamma and Roygee!

A bit of a confession: The original post was by me, not katfeete. For some obscure reason, the forums logged me in as her and constantly logged me out whenever I tried to post as myself. I didn't expect anyone on the Hexagon forums to recognize her name, since it's not her usual area. In my defense, the hatchet *is* being made for her, and I expect it'll show up on here as a freebie if I manage to do a decent job of it.

Now that I'm finally able to post as myself, I'll go ask her about the dynamic links to the freebies. And finish watching that subdiv tutorial I've been avoiding for three days :)

Thanks again!

zlotnikov

According to Kat, it's just bbcode, like so:

<a href="http://www.sharecg.com/pf/full_uploads.php?pf_user_name=katastrophe">My freebies on ShareCG</a>

Hope that helps.

Roygee

Thank you - I'll try that out :)