Hey Adam, before we get into the particulars, would it make sense in future to have separate forums or threads specific to the software being discussed? I’m a little concerned that the ‘Discussion’ page is beginning to look a bit cluttered by all the posts that have collected here. And yes, I realize that the blame for that falls mostly on me. ;-)
Anyway, here’s a sample problem that I would encounter in Modo on a pretty regular basis, but which wouldn’t be a problem at all in SW. It’s a typical example of joining two different geometries together. I’ve noticed that in every tutorial like this one, the person who created the model conveniently joins the parts at a point where he’s guaranteed to get a good clean result. In the case below, notice how the donut intersects the faces of the cube so that the resulting arrangement of polygons where they meet has a nice radial symmetry:
My question is, what happens in cases when you’re modeling an actual object and don’t have the luxury of placing the intersections of parts in places where their polygon grids happen to match up perfectly? My assumption is that what you’d get then is not the nice radially symmetrical arrangement of polygons shown above, but a warped mesh on at least one of the surfaces. Would that cause potential problems for the model? When I’ve tried patching the two together in the type of case I’ve described, I end up with some polygons being longer than others because the polygon grids don’t line up. It looks OK until I hit the Tab key; then I see that the edges of some of the ‘stretched’ polygons seem to be tearing loose from the rest of the polygon mesh. I’m not sure why that happens or how to correct it. I’ve asked about this on the Luxology forum, but as is so often the case, I never got a reply. :-(