›–» Adding/Deleting Faces

There are a number of techniques used when creating objects that fall under the category of Adding and Deleting faces. Its quite an important subject because the use of some of these techniques can drastically reduce the number of faces in your objects, which is always good. The following techniques allow you to this without loosing quality and shape in your work.

Auto Reduction
When you subtract/union an object from another, it automatically remove unnessacery faces fro mthe object at the same time. So one way of cleaning up your mesh is to create a cube, move it far away from your object and subtract it from your object. So that its not actually taken anything away from your object yet TS will still auto remove any surplus faces. (Note: TS dosent reduce the quality of your objects when it does it, it removes faces that, if removed would have no effect on the mesh.) Here is an example:

Above you can see a cone with WAY too many faces, notice that after the subtraction TS automatically removes all the unnessacery faces on the sides of the cone. This techniques dosent always have much effect but in some cases, especially when you've been subdiving faces and deforming, it can seriously help.

Deleting Faces
When creating an object with sides that cant be seen. For example the back of a picture than goes on the wall or the bottom of a sofa that sits on the floor. You don't need to render those sides of the objectm, sonce you'll never see them. So another way to reduce the number of faces in your object is to delete these parts of your objects. To delete the faces on an object, click and hold on the Point Edit button ( ) and then move your mouse up to the Delete Face button (  ) and release to select. Now simply click on the faces on the object you would like to remove, like so:

Here is a statue object I made for AWTeen's Inaugurations Day. The second picture is an underneath view of the model after I've deleted the bottom of the model. Notice in trueSpace you are able to see the inside of the object as if you've cut off the bottom and hollowed it out. This is not the case, when the object is viewed in Active Worlds, from the hole you will just see through the object as if it wasent there. Whenever making objects that are against a wall or on the floor, always delete faces that wont be seen to reduce lag.

Adding Faces
There are three ways to add new faces to an object:

› Quad Division/Smoothing ( )
Division merely splits all faces into 4 smaller faces giving you more to work with when deforming where as Smoothing does this also but repositions some of your polygons to make the oversall shape of your object smoother. The drawbacks include that TS can only reconise basic shapes such as spheres, cones, etc.. and smooth them and that this is INCREDIBLY heavy on faces. I rarely ever use this on my models.

› Triangulation ( )
Triangulation is much the same as quad division except it splits each cell in half diagonally creating two smaller triangles.

› Polygon Drawing (  )
Also accessed from the point edit menu ( ), this tool lets you manually draw on ireegularly shaped polygons in any way that you like. This can cause rendering issues in Active Worlds though due to the fact that you are creating unusual shapes vertices, this becomes especially apparent when you start deforming such shapes.

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