Efficent mesh Clean up

[Anonymous]

Hey, does anyone have any advice on faster methods of deleting double or multiple faces on a mesh like a character's head for example ?

[Anonymous]

What do you mean by double or multiple faces? Could you post a screenshot?

[Anonymous]

Well i've noticed that when i change between the smoothness of of model by switching from number keys 1,2 and 3 the faces tend to appear shaped oddly. I've also noticed that when i delete a face, there is still another under it in an over lapping manner. When i am viewing with the x ray mode some faces also appear darker than others. I've had some faces between polygons that also threw off the mesh with i changed the smoothness views.

[Anonymous]

AHHHH! I'm serious, I cringed whrn I saw that. first off, turn on backface culling to check your normals by pressing view>backface culling.

[Anonymous]

Post the scene file and I could help more.

[Anonymous]

lol yea when i first started this project i didn't have a good understanding of the back face culling. I uploaded the scene file and a picture of the head after turning on the culling. The scene is part of a larger character model which clearly needs more polishing. So what does it mean then for those faces that are invisible when the culling is on ??

14951_RZM4jy8f7H4OZVuvhCr1.zip

[Anonymous]

Wow. This ones gonna be tough. If they are in visible when looking at them from the OUTSIDE then you need to select all the invisible faces and reverse them with normals>reverse.

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the advice dude.

[n8skow]

Is this a Sub-D surface?

[Anonymous]

Faces on top of other faces like that are know as "lamina" faces - think laminated paper
When two polygon faces share all their vertices and edges

There is an option in mesh>cleanup for lamina faces that should help.

looking at your first image, I'd say the joins between the faces are a bit haphazard though - the lamina faces cleanup may give better results if you merge vertices across the model first. (grab all the verts, editmesh>merge use a really small value like 0.001)

Rather than back face culling (which is going to show you which way a polygon is pointing) use the xray shaded mode.
(in the panel "shading>xray")
where the xray is more opaque - you have more doubled up faces. I also find the poly count really useful for cleaning this stuff up.

Try to work out how you managed to do this when you were modelling so you can avoid it in future

hope that helps