Lossless conversion from mesh to poly?

[ajl1931]

I'm making a figure skate right now, and I'm using a spline cage. That part is done, but I want to turn it into a poly so I can manually refine it further. However, converting the whole thing to a poly causes it to get all janky and ugly, though converting it to a mesh keeps it intact. Is there any way to turn it into a poly while preserving the shape from the spline cage?

[ragupasta]

can you post bigger screenshots with edged faces on. Are you using the surface modifier? If so it might be the topology spinner needs tweaking.

[ajl1931]

Here's another. The top is the spline cage, the bottom is the poly. hard to see unless you compare the two side by side. Screwing with the topology spinner still made it janky, just om different ways.

This seems to be kinda like the problem I had when I converted a mesh to a poly in the model I'm working on now - everything just kinda got all screwy.

[ragupasta]

Surface modifer hates 3 and 5+ sided polygons, thats what is causing you the troubles. Turn the cage into quads before you surface the splines.

[ajl1931]

Still getting the same results. It's not so much the spline cage itself, but that is freaks out and gets jagged when I throw an Edit Poly modifier on there. It becomes less severe if I reduce the Patch Topology spinner, but that makes it get extremely simple and lose the contours that I created.

Again, if I turn it into an Editable Mesh, it's fine - no clue how to make it a poly and not lose quality, though.

[ajl1931]

Ah, waitaminit - the edges you see in the screenshot are the same that become selectable when I make it a poly. I want the skate to be very high-poly - so is there a way to turn the cage into a higher-density model that reflects the contours of the surface modifier, THEN turn it into a poly?

[Lanceafer]

I'm not sure but my guess is that when you add the edit poly it is not having fun with the curved splines. In my experience edit poly likes nice strait lines that don't overlap and have verts that are more or less even on a plane. From what I see it looks like it doesn't know how to shade the curve. Try adjusting the smoothing groups maybe?

[ajl1931]

Smoothing helped, but the geometry is still warped (so it gives it the look of a velvet shoe, not a skate).

Here's a picture of it as an editable mesh, with all the faces/edges selected - as you can see, it's high-poly and preserves the contours, which is what I'm looking for. As an editable poly, I would think it would keep these, but as quads instead of tris, but it doesn't seem to want to do that and just maintains the larger faces, making it appear blocky and strange.

[ragupasta]

upload the max file and i'll take a look. Without seeing the file, its hard to help really.

[TwiiK]

From the looks of your stack you haven't actually converted your mesh in any of the scenarios shown here, you seem to have just added an 'edit poly' or 'edit mesh' modifier ontop. Do you need to access the line and surface modifiers later on?

If not I would try to right click the model and actually convert it to an editable poly. If that doesn't work try converting it to an editable mesh first and then convert it to an editable poly. By default the different conversions are at the bottom right of the quad menu which appears when you right click your object in the viewport.