Tire Geometry Issue
 

I made these tire treads from a poly plane and duplicated them around the rim of the car. For some reason, when I duplicated and converted to sub-ds, the geometry got terible. Anyone know how I can fix this?

pic 1...

...sry, cant post pics or some reason...

did you attach all the pieces into one poly object and merge the vertices as well?

another thing to think about is that converting to sub-d is an awful lot like smoothing (well to me, anyway). so if you want to keep a hard edge you'll either have to add them later or keep them in mind while modeling the original poly plane (for example, 3 edges close together will make a better crease than just two, and only one edge will just make a smooth transition between the closest two edges).

Yeah I did all of that. The biggest problem was the multiple triangles on the sides of the tire that came from duplicating. Don't know how to fix that. The # of triangles range in the thousands...

upload your pics to photobucket or something, then just use the [ img ] code they provide. that way i can see what you're talkin about.

Somehow I lost the pic, and I havent used Maya in a while to do another screen shot.
What I did was model the tire with a poly plane and duplicated it 360 degrees around the tire rim.

When I dupluicated, there were triangles around the side of the tire and I dont know how to fix it.

:attn: :beer: :beer: :beer:

without seeing a pic, i would assume that you can reduce the number of triangles before performing the duplication. while keeping the side the same, merge edges, verts, etc. until you can reduce the number of triangles you have on the edge. if you can't reduce them, then the only other option i can think of is to merge all the poly portions into one object (polygons -->combine) and then merging edges/verts from there on.

at the same time, if you can do that just for one duplication, i'd recommend you do that and then just duplicate the new object half the time around.