In this lesson, we're going to cover something that's really like a puzzle and that is reducing the
number of edges like we saw coming into the eye.
So we have an area of high density of loops into an area of low density.
And we saw that was resolved right here in this face.
OK, and we're going to learn how to do this and we're going to simplify it and we're going to use planes.
So let's create a plane, go to the poly modeling menu and click the plane.
I'll head F to frame up on it and then I'll hit G and make another one.
And of course, G is the shortcut for just doing the previous operation again.
So then I'll move these kind of close together to make our job easier here in a minute and drag these
kind of back in the center here.
So the two planes we have have the exact same number of loops.
And so if we wanted to combine them and be pretty straightforward, we just need to merge these edges
down.
Right.
So that they would all line up perfectly.
That's not what happens in modeling, especially in organic modeling, where you have an area of high
density like the head that have a larger surface area.
So there's more edges to describe it and it needs to all feed into the eyeball or the eyelid into an
area of much smaller area.
So not all the edge loops can fit in there.
So let's take this kind of simplified version here of these two planes.
And first, we'll do this one on the left has ten edge loops and let's do this one on the right has
eight.
So try to follow along if you can, because it'll make a lot more sense because this can be very confusing.
And you probably don't want to bookmark this video specifically to revisit because you're going to run
into this issue again and again and an organic modeling and you're going to have to remember all the
time.
All right.
How do I resolve this?
How do I, you know, combine an area of higher density of loops into lower?
So fortunately, this first example is going to be the easiest type.
So we have both even number of objectives we have over here and eight over here.
So before we can start combining edges, we need to merge these two meshes down.
We can see in outliner there's plain one in plain to.
So there are two different pieces of meshes.
They're not the same.
So we need to combine them.
So I'll shift select.
So I have both of them selected and I'll go to Mesh Combine.
And you can see that now there's one plane that we have selected and it has both sides selected, so
we know it's combined, but we have these empty groups over here.
It looks kind of messy.
And this is part of the history that Maya creates.
When you do a big operation like combine, you can see it has the inputs over here.
There's there's the Unite one.
And so to get rid of these empty groups, you could just delete them.
But the cleaner way to do it is to delete the history which we've done before.
So let's go to edit, delete by type.
And again, let's just do this one, not the bottom.
And this will delete everything in the scene.
We don't want that.
We want this top one delete by type history and then that gets rid of those empty groups and it cleans
up the outliner.
And so now let's get to work.
Let's go to the edge operation here, right.
Clicking and dragging to it and click and drag these two edges that are kind of matched up together.
And let's go to the edit mesh and I'm going to tear this menu off and we're going to go down to the
merge option here.
And there's a couple different ways you could do it.
You get hit, merge.
Nothing happens.
Why did nothing happened?
Well, let's look at this tolerance value.
It's it's set at zero right now.
But as soon as we drag that up a little bit, a tolerance value is a distance.
And when you increase the distance it's looking for, it's going to start to find that distance.
So we can see it's probably these two pieces are like point to units apart.
So that's when it starts to merge them.
So let's click and drag and do that for all of the edges down here.
We're going to bring up the merge tool again and merge these down.
And again, you may have to increase that tolerance value each time you go.
Energy and just increased tolerance, so you can do more than one at a time, but you'll see as soon
as you start to get where, you know there's two right next to each other that you don't want to be
Marje.
You have to do them by themselves, of course.
So then what do we do here?
This is what the lesson is all about.
OK, we need to figure out a way to deal with this.
So how do we do that?
Why can't we just merge, pull us over to see over and just have that be what it is?
Well, in animation, when that starts happening and defamations happen, you'll get a gap here.
You'll be able to see through the model or this will bend in a weird way so that shadows and reflections
will look very odd.
So that's why in modeling and organic modeling, you always want to have Quad's, and that means each
face needs four sides.
You never want to have a face with five sides, which is called an end gone.
That's in Geon.
And you don't want to have a face that has three sides, which is a try a triangle.
So those are the parameters you need to work in.
Everything has to be acquired.
That's why we can't just pull this over and call it a day, because if we try to merge this here, then
that would create a new edge for this face right here.
And instead of this face having four edges now, it would have five and now and making it an in gone,
we would have an edge at the top here, an edge right here and then three more.
So I'd make it five.
So we need to figure out how to keep it to four edges so that each face is acquired, OK.
So without understanding, we need to figure out how to resolve this.
And this is very similar to the example we saw above.
So I'm going to show you how to do that now.
So I'm going to show you how to do that.
Now, let's select both of these and scale them in.
So now we can merge all three of these vertices down, let's merge these down and you'll see where I'm
going with this here in a second.
So we'll create some problems for ourselves and then we'll solve them.
OK, so now we can at least combine these two edges.
So let's select those and G to merge those.
Oh, that G over here to merge that.
So what did I say earlier.
We don't want triangles and what do I have here.
I have two triangles.
They happen to be right next to each other.
So what does that mean.
That means we can delete the edge in the middle.
Let's do that.
So we've deleted this edge in the middle and the middle.
It's still looks like a triangle.
But if we count the number of edges, it's actually four.
There's one here, one here, one here and one here.
That's four.
So even though it looks like a triangle, it has four edges.
So it's acquired.
And we can do we can make this look like a quad just by going to the vertices here and pulling this
one out.
Now, we can see a little better that there are, in fact, four edges.
So that's how we get down to reducing an area of high density of wedge flow into a low density of flow.
And there's one other little tool I'll show just very briefly.
We can talk about this a little later as well.
But if I wanted to resolve this kind of messy look to the edge flow here with a different tool, we
could go to sculpting and choose this one right here.
This is the relaxed tool.
If I click this, I need to select the polygon mesh.
I'll select the face.
You can see everything kind of grays out the edge flow does.
And it tells me I'm sculpting on this shape, this plane here.
And what the relaxed tool does is it will not change.
It will not sculpt on this polygon.
I won't raise or lower it or deform it in any way.
What it will do is relax the edge flow.
And if your brush size is too big, you can hold down B and Middle Mouse Dragon will change the brush
size.
So it's way too big.
Just scale it down here with the middle mouse and holding B and if I click and just kind of hold down
my mouse and drag around, you can see it just relaxing the edge flow here.
So it makes it flow into the next area a lot more cleanly.
And it did that kind of pull out force here where this face, instead of looking like a triangle, looks
more like a quad now and again, and it just doesn't look like it.
But but by geometric components of its edges, it is, in fact a quad.
That's how we do a reduction of air flow from an area of high to low.
And the next lesson we're going to cover the more difficult version of this of odd number, and that
will take a little more problem solving and puzzle solving.
So some people find this very fun because it is like solving a puzzle and other times can be very frustrating
when trying to figure this out.
So I hope this makes sense and how to merge areas of high density and low density.
Let's move on to a more advanced problem in the next lesson.
Thanks for watching.