From the course: Meshmixer Essential Training

Overview of view modes: How to best see your model - Meshmixer Tutorial

From the course: Meshmixer Essential Training

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Overview of view modes: How to best see your model

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[Narrator]- I do want to record a short video to stress how important a proper view mode is. So we have our default bunny here. I can work on this bunny with very, very dramatic shaders applied, so maybe this purple one, it looks great looks really awesome to work on it. And as I'm sculpting and doing things, I can see a bit how things are changing. I can press the W for wireframe key to really see how things are changing over time, as things are growing and I'm adding different volumes into the mesh and all of that. And as I'm going in and selecting different areas, I can create different face groups and all of that. But, these shaders are not probably the best shaders to use. So this was a green face group, if I go down and try to find some sort of metallic green shader like this, some of the face group colors can kind of get blended into the model itself, and there are sometimes some issues that you run into I'm, example, using the "inflate" key in reverse to deflate. So, I've just created something that is a huge, huge problem for 3D printers and for modeling. So you might think, ah, really doesn't look that bad. Let me do it again here onto the ear and I'm just kind of modeling in different ways. But, you see, I'm using the "inflate" tool, It's inflating right here, inflating right here, but here it's actually deflating. Why the heck is that? Or, I do the "deflate" tool, and I deflate, but here it's inflating. What's going on? You can't really tell. The way that you fix that is, you go to "shaders" and you go all the way to the top using this little slider here, and select this second one. If we drag this into our model, these faces are actually called "back faces". I'm not going to go too into it, but the models inside of Meshmixer are called shell-based models, that I'll talk about in other videos. There is an inside and an outside to every single face. And let me turn off the grid here. So if we look right here, on this triangle, there is an outside face marked in a silver color, and if we rotate in, an inside face marked in pink. Now, if we tried to 3D print this, it would completely not work because the slicer would say "oh, great, outside face, outside, outside face, let me turn the corner here. Wait, this is acting as an outside face but it's marked as an inside face, I can't print on the inside." And it suddenly makes this skin infinitely thin, and the slicer doesn't know what to do. So, same thing happened with this inflate tool. So if we zoom up here, and I go to "inflate" and use this as an inverse inflation, I'll go slowly. Great, it's shrinking it until the outside becomes the inside, and we're able to tell that that's a problem because of the coloring applied. If we go to some different shader that might look really really cool, we're not able to see inside and outside faces. So just be really, really aware that even though this might look like a boring shader, it is one that gives you a lot of good information and can help save you from problems before you make them. In this example, I would just want to go back and go to "actions" to undo or ctrl or command + z to undo all of those actions so that I did them properly. There are other tools besides the deflate tool that it can use to get that thinness. And I wouldn't have known unless I was using that shader. So it's really really important to use the proper shaders. Also, I tend to stay in this facet shader because I can see the facets without having to turn on wireframe. Wireframe is very very useful, but sometimes it gets kind of annoying to see all of these triangles, so if you turn this off, you can still see a little bit of the triangles, but it's a lot nicer to do sculpting without seeing all of those triangles all the time. Now, obviously, if you are sculpting with these triangles, you can see when problems start to arise. For example, I'll create a problem right here where these two things start intersecting. Right, and I can only really tell that they are fully intersecting when I go into wireframe mode. But for general, I kind of like to stay in this faceted mesh coloring mode. But you can certainly go back and just smooth if you just really want to play around and play around with different forms and shapes. So hopefully, that's a good overview of just what environment you should start off in until you get more experienced in Meshmixer and then you can go and do things that more please your eye.

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