You won’t get to see any of the pictures of the mess I made. I didn’t take any. And I’m still trying to figure out how to render the wireframe view of the models. And since to see one of the messes you would need to see the wire-frame, well, you just have to trust me.
So what happened was, I started creating the window. I did it in three parts, the casing, which would be the part between the wall and the window, the frame, which would be the part around the glass and the glass. Once I created the casing I decided I had too many polygons or edges, I’m not sure which. Anyway, I tried removing a few edges I should not have and I ended up with some ngons. It probably would not have been quite so bad except that I was planning on adding turbosmooth and that could go bad. So I had to figure out how to fix that.
I toyed with just recreating the casing since it really was not that difficult or involved an item to create. That is not what I did though. I had already had to recreate the frame, which I’ll get to in a moment. So I didn’t really want to recreate the casing, if I didn’t have to. Fortunately the number of missing edges was not high or a very complicated configuration.
However, I did still have to figure out what I was doing. I was able to connect a couple of vertices and thought I was on my way until I tried to connect more vertices that were crossing an edge. They wouldn’t connect. Ok. So I need another vertex to connect to. I choose vertex and add and I think I click on the edge I want the vertex on but it’s not there. It’s off in space some place. Joy. Delete new vertex. It turns out that if I want to add a vertex to an edge I must first choose the edge selection tool. Then I have an option for adding a vertex. That worked. I added the required vertices so that I could connect across the edges or rather connect to a vertex on the edge and then that to the other vertex. I know it explains weird without visual aids.
That I got fixed.
The frame was another issue. When I applied materials to the frame I had some weird holes in the frame. Some were obviously a plane that was messed up. I had heard about this type of issue in a tutorial I watched so I figured the problem was that the normal was flipped. The normal is the side of the plane that should be facing the viewer. In most cases they are not double sided so if you are looking at the wrong side it looks like a window through to the other side. I found, in the right-click menu, the option to flip the normal. For some of the normals this worked. For others, not so much. I would flip it but it looked like only half of it flipped. When I tried looking at it in wireframe I appeared that I had duplicate edges and some edges connected where they shouldn’t be. It was quite a mess. I apparently created this catastrophe when I removed the inner plane to create the opening for the glass and then tried to connect the remaining edges to create a plane. I guess, actions that I thought had not worked, actually did and so I made and ugly mess.
The frame was not as easy to correct as the casing was. I did have to create a whole new one. I created the edge loops like before and tried removing the plane like before and that did not work out at first. I think what I ended up doing was connecting the one plane to the other which called it to sort of collapse on itself. I say, I think, because that did not work the next time I tried something like that. But it worked and my normals are all facing the correct direction now. Whew.
In the process of dealing with the weirded out normals and planes. I found a tool in the viewport menu that I could use to see the flipped normals. Mine is set so that if the normal is flipped it displays a really bright neon lime green. It’s effective.
So I made a good size mess and had to clean it all up. I’ll try to keep the messes smaller so the articles are shorter. No guarantees though.