Noob car modelling SOS

Hi, so I am modelling a car for the first time and I haven’t finished the bonnet before running into a problem…

So here it is in 3D view, and as you can see it has multiple colours and swirls and things on it:


I thought it may be a glitch so I ignored it and later went on to subdivide it to see how it looked:


LIKE WTF?!

Here is the wire frame modifier applied, It looks different in wire frame view though, with many edges missing:


Can anyone help me resolve this?

Thanks :smiley:

Moved from “General Forums > Blender and CG Discussions” to “Support > Modeling”

i’m not sure, but you may have duplicate and / or disconnected faces, and maybe some inverted normal. could you post a file? just the bonnet will be fine. use pasteall.
(edit) or the attachment feature…I think you have enough posts to do so, but I wasn’t sure

Also, regarding the difference that you’re seeing in your wires, you can enable the Draw All Edges checkbox in the Display panel of Object Properties. By default, Blender optimizes the 3D View by hiding wires in the middle of co-planar faces. Enabling that checkbox removes that optimization.

Uh huh … almost certain that (at least) “not all the surface-normals are pointing the same way.”

Duplicate vertices, and/or intersecting faces, can also produce these sorts of artifacts. (The fact that the “wire frame modifier applied” image seems … shall we say … “oddly shaded,” is also a give-away of underlying normals/faces issues.)

Here is the blend file:

I have tried recalculating the normals, but that didn’t change much. Also here is a photo of edit mode:


I know I could just start again, but I want to know how / what it is so I can avoid doing it again next time!
I will try the other suggestions in the thread and report back :stuck_out_tongue: Thanks for the help.

–Edit–

Tried clicking “draw all edges” and it has fixed the wire frame view so it looks like the edit view, although the subdivide function still creates the same results…

The object scale is unapplied which may cause problems later. Object mode, ctrl+A -> scale to apply.

There are four long faces connected underneath which prevent making normals consistent from working.


You have some large n-gons ( faces with more than 4 edges ) over most of your model. It is they that are causing all the problems. In general, it’s best to avoid them. Go into face select mode, and try to delete them. The rest should be fine once they are deleted.

Argh… There’s already crowded… Never mind.

@JA12 Hi, thanks for looking, but I can’t seem to remove the faces underneath?? Face select doesn’t work and it is hard to tell where they connect, can you show me how you removed them?

Thanks :slight_smile:

@Modron Hi, I don’t really understand what you mean, when I go into edit mode I can only see one N-gon and that is at the front where it goes up in the middle? Can you explain more, because apart from that there shouldn’t be any more unless they have been put there by accident… :confused:

@eppo yep, posted at the same time as JA12 was posting…d-oh. @Desertpenguin I used the face select tool to select those n-gons. just get underneath it and look for the dots ( the type of dots you get in face select mode ) that aren’t aligned evenly with the rest of the dots. those will be your n-gons. click near the dot to select.
(edit) also, there’s a way to select faces by number of edges, I just can’t remember how it works. I know sanctuary knows though, maybe he’ll stumble across this thread.

Thanks so much everyone for the help and getting this sorted out!!!

I just have 1 last question, and that is how would this have happened in the first place? Am I correct in guessing that when I was selecting vertices and filling in faces I forgot to deselect other vertices first?

Thanks again :smiley:

you probably just pressed F accidentally.

The underbonnet is chock-full of n-gons. You have an upper surface made of mostly quads but, below that, there is a mess of… 28-gons?

This is a corrected version of your bonnet. The bad geometry is on another object.
Audis7(corrected).blend (99.7 KB)