🧵 How to optimally merge multiple meshes into one?
Anonymous at Sun, 10 Jul 2022 06:12:21 UTC No. 907491
I've been trying to figure this out on and off for months now so hopefully I'm not a complete retard asking a question with an obvious answer since google has been mostly useless so far; I'm trying to figure out how to convert multiple meshes into one in blender, so there's nothing clipping through or inside anything else. Pic related is not actually what I'm working on but I'm gonna use it as an example since it decently illustrates the same problems I have to solve; right now this is 12 cylinders (8 barrels plus 4 'rings') and I need it to just be one mesh, instead of 12 that clip through each other a bunch. My rough knowledge of this and other digital software would lead me to believe you would solve this problem in one of two ways, but I can't manage to figure out how to do either.
1) You would run a process to add a line to each face at each place of intersection on each cylinder, then delete the newly-separated inside parts, then merge all the cylinder meshes and merge the vertices by distance, to end up with one single mesh. I would just do this without making this post, except I have no idea what that first process is called or if it even exists.
2) I can kind of only describe this in photoshop terms, which is a bad start, but essentially you'd select the inverse (everywhere but the space occupied by this) and then invert that selection, so what you'd end up with is just the exterior surface of your collection of objects, which you could then fill and have one mesh. This is probably just not how blender works, though, based on what I've been able to find so far.
The closest thing I could find at all was a Boolean modifier, but as far as I can tell that only puts 'cuts' into one mesh at a time and wants them to all be closed shapes, which does absolutely nothing for me because I have roughly several hundred separate meshes I need to make into one mesh and pretty much none of them are manifold.
Anonymous at Sun, 10 Jul 2022 06:38:42 UTC No. 907493
>>907491
If you're not needing the geometry to be super clean, you could just use a remesh modifier set to voxel and have a sufficiently small value, with adaptivity turned up a bit to not waste polys on planar surfaces. Poly count will still be pretty high though.
Apart from that, your best bet is to just retopo it, or make it "right" the first time.
Also, questions thread next time.
>>902981
Anonymous at Sun, 10 Jul 2022 06:57:07 UTC No. 907495
>>907493
Shit my bad, when I skimmed the catalog and saw so many question threads I didn't think to look for a general thread for it, sorry.
>remesh
This is new to me and not a completely useless output, but it does look a bit poor and I would ideally like to do this as losslessly as possible.
>retopo/do it right
I knew that from the start, but I'm trying to make an established model of something from a game into a single-mesh 3D-printable version that I can also add a few things onto, if I start from scratch it'll be pretty obviously wrong no matter what with how much tiny detail is on the game model.
Anonymous at Sun, 10 Jul 2022 12:54:56 UTC No. 907526
>>907495
if it's for 3D printing then remeshing at a ridiculously high value that freezes your blender, and then decimating most of the useless polys away would be the fastest way to do it
Anonymous at Sun, 10 Jul 2022 13:47:35 UTC No. 907533
>>907495
Every decent modern 3D slicer handles intersecting multiple mesh geometry without a problem, why does it have to be merged together?
Anonymous at Sun, 10 Jul 2022 17:00:42 UTC No. 907584
>>907533
>Every decent modern 3D slicer handles intersecting multiple mesh geometry without a problem
Wrong.
Anonymous at Sun, 10 Jul 2022 17:31:53 UTC No. 907589
So..... Boolean?
Anonymous at Sun, 10 Jul 2022 21:22:58 UTC No. 907644
>>907526
Yeah this worked fine on my example, but when I did it to the actual thing I'm trying to fix, it deleted large surface areas of it for seemingly no reason, and so far I can't manage to get it to not do that. I've also looked into multiple other auto-remesh options since my last post, and none of them have worked so far either.
>>907533
Does it? I was under the impression I needed an end result that was manifold and has no clipping in order to print without severe issues, and currently I don't have either of those conditions met.
>>907589
If I can boolean an indeterminate number of separate meshes at once then yeah this would be it, but I'm pretty sure I can't do that, at least as far as I can tell.
Anonymous at Sun, 10 Jul 2022 22:55:14 UTC No. 907669
>>907644
Ultimaker Cura has no problems slicing meshes with intersecting geometry.
Anonymous at Sun, 10 Jul 2022 23:31:53 UTC No. 907675
>>907669
Downloaded that program to check, it does say it can print it but the preview looks very wrong which presumably means I do indeed need to fix it, especially since I'm printing this at a fairly large scale that'll have to either be outsourced to a printing service or printed in a lot of parts and then glued together.
Anonymous at Sun, 24 Jul 2022 17:57:05 UTC No. 909887
Bump because I like this post and want more ppl to read it
Anonymous at Sun, 24 Jul 2022 18:39:20 UTC No. 909896
>>907491
in general you don't want to model by having tons of different meshes in the first place - you do that for prototyping (setting the scales and finding out what works), then when your rough blockout (general shape with abominable geometry) is finished, you redo the entire thing without any intersections and as few objects as possible.
distance yourself from the idea of salvaging shitty geometry and just work by blocking out, then doing it properly in one piece.
as a general piece of advice: go through arrimus3d's playlists on Youtube to learn how to do that - this is an opportunity to switch to 3ds max and learn it all in one go.
Anonymous at Tue, 2 Aug 2022 08:09:49 UTC No. 911871
>>909896
>distance yourself from the idea of salvaging shitty geometry
Unfortunately that's the specific thing I need to do here, this is a pre-existing asset that needs to still look like the ingame model after cleanup, which is not gonna happen if I redo it unless I have a huge massive misunderstanding of how precise redoing a model from scratch can be
Anonymous at Tue, 2 Aug 2022 09:10:48 UTC No. 911878
>>907644
>If I can boolean an indeterminate number of separate meshes at once then yeah this would be it
Using the exams image in OP, just merge all the long cylinders into one mesh, merge all the rings into one mesh and then Boolean them together.
Anonymous at Tue, 2 Aug 2022 09:22:09 UTC No. 911880
>>911878
The example is an abstraction, I can't make what I'm working on into only 2 meshes. Closest I've gotten to a solution is >>907739 but that isn't working on the game asset for reasons I have yet to figure out, either my model is so much more fucked up than this dude's that this can't work or I did something wrong, haven't been able to determine which is the case though