Better Creasing Methods in SubD??
 

Hey everyone,

Ok I'm working on a car model and I'm trying to figure out a better way to make nice hard creases with a bit of a radius to them so they pick up the highlights from the lights better like they would realisticly.

If I just make the edge a hard crease its way to hard...and there is no nice smooth roundness to it...I found I could make it a hard crease then go refine...refine and finally uncrease and this works great however if I do this to all the areas of my car model where there alot of these kinds of edges....then I'll get too weighty of mesh and the render times will suck....


Is there a better way?.The only thing I can think of is to bevel the edge in poly mode then when I convert to Sub_d and make my creases partial it should land making a better crease..and a lighter mesh...


However beveling an edge makes alot of extra faces and vertices which cause un-necessary tweaking to them up...multipy this by a few edges and I seem to be creating more work than should be...

Suggestions for a better method?

Thanks Troy

I'm modelling a sub-d car at the moment too... a Porsche 959. I guess I should probably open a thread for it in the WIP forum. For my edges I used partial crease and just kept applying it until the edge was as sharp as I wanted. 2 applications was enough on most of the edges.

here's a pic

So I assume that in preparation for the edge you had either beveled it with a small number or used the spilt poly tool, that way in Sub-d you only needed a 2 partial creases to make it nice and sharp?

It is not necessary to bevel the edges (depending on what you want your crease to look like).

I did use the split poly tool in some creases. For example in the line around the door there are actually three lines in a V shape with a full crease on the bottom and a double partial crease on the top edges. But on the footstep under the door I only used a double partial crease.

The more partial creases you apply the more the sub-d will look like your proxy. Sometimes if you bevel you might not need to crease the edge.