Well I'm just very happy for you cause you have a hit here and it looks like it's going to be a success - congrats!



Just a quick question concerning controling the resultant mesh topology of revolved surfaces

In the picture below, I've created the diamond shaped pivot and motor (barrel) for the radar dish using revolved profile curves.

I notice upon export most of those shapes instead of having ngons at the top have triangulated topology. In the interest of polygon reduction, obviously I'd prefer an ngon since it's a single flat polygon.

The same happened at the tip of the radar dish since that was a revolved profile as well. In that case however (as the insert shows) I decided to take a straight line and trim off the bit that had the triangles. It reduces the height or length of the object but at least you get a clean ngon during export (as shown in the inset.)

Is there a better way to do this?

I noticed for example when I created half the revolved shape for the radar base (the lower cylinder), when I mirrored the part for the opposite side, the mirrored part had a smooth planar circle (indicating that a ngon would be created there upon export) so I immediately deleted the original revolved piece and mirrored that cleaner part back.

I'm just wondering how I can force an ngon in those planar surfaces of revolved shapes?

Is there a function or is there some kind of best practice of creating these kinda shapes to avoid the triangles?

I'm thinking now perhaps if I delete the surface part with the triangles and then select the remaining edge curve and hit planar surface maybe that will work - I'll give that a try next!

Any suggestions or thoughts appreciated!

-Will

Hi Will, your idea on deleting the top face and using Planar should do the trick. Once the underlying surface there is a simple plane, you will get a single n-gon there. One note - in this case you should be able to just select the entire object and then do Planar - when a full object is selected you can still run Planar on it and it will look for unattached edges and put trimmed planes on them.

There is actually some stuff built into revolve that tries to detect these types of revolved end planes and replaces them with simple planes. I just tried it on a few simple revolves and it seemed to be working, the only thing is that your line has to come really quite exactly perpendicular off of the revolve axis. If you can post one of the curves that you revolved that did not get a plane at the end, I could check it out.

- Michael