Prototyping part 6: Troubleshooting naked points

- [Instructor] In this prototyping lesson, we move from the naked edge problem, to the even scarier naked point problem. This used to be the biggest pain until I developed a handy little workaround. And my hacknique, I call it, is not 100% ideal, but it has worked every time I have used it. Let's zoom into our model here, and talk about what this naked point is. Well, in the prior video, we looked at naked edges, so a naked point is just a super small edge that shows up as a single point.

And if we also remember from the prior video, it needs to be closed, so it is definitely an error in the model, that you may have created unintentionally, usually, and it needs to be closed when you want to prototype. So, how do we close it? Guess what, there is no command, unlike the close naked edge command we just used. So we can find the points though, using some of the similar commands. Let's do that, want to click on our model, go to analyze, edge tools, show edges, so if it says all edges here, you want to bump down to naked edges, and in the command line, it says there are 12 naked edges, and 64 total edges.

We're only concerned about the naked edges. But this sometimes can be a little misleading, let me show you why. I can only find four of these points here, a little bit hard to see, right there. Only find four, that means each one has like three points stacked on top of each other. So kind of analyzing the situation, we've got a surface here, and one to each side. So that kind of makes sense, that there might be three points stacked. So that's how we find it. The trick is, how do we fix it? I already mentioned there is no command.

Now if you're in Rhino 6, you may be in luck, there is a command called remove all naked micro-edges. I know that's a mouth full, and I've tried it on here, and it only solved part of the problem. Okay, that's plan A, should try that first, especially if you're in Rhino 6. Plan B, I would have done in the past, until I developed this technique which I'm going to show you next. That involves kind of extracting or removing some of the surfaces, and then rebuilding them as much as possible, and then testing again, and see if there's any naked edges.

That can sometimes work, other times not. So that leads us to plan C which I've now done far more often, just because it seems to work every time. So we're going to clean up this naked point, which actually I just said has like three stacked on top, by doing something kind of weird. I'm going to go over to the solid toolbar here, and we're going to put a sphere from center or radius, and put that right on top of the hole. Now you definitely want to zoom in.

I'm going to keep this guy as small as possible. If it's snapping to too many things, like mine is now, you can hit down the Alt key, and go ahead and make that guy pretty tiny. So now we have a little baby sphere. So what does that do? Well, I'm going to use it to cover up that naked point. We're going to select both the sphere, and the overall object poly surface, and go ahead and do a boolean union. So the shortcut is right here. We can also find that on the solid menu and toolbar.

So we're going to union those two together. Now the surface seems to have changed, we just got the iso curves turned on, which typically happens. Let's go ahead and add this object back into the edge analysis, right-click, and we have less naked edges! So it went from 12 down to nine, so my assumption or theory that there was three stacked on top, proved to be correct. Now when we zoom out, it's important to keep this in context. You can probably just stop right there, and go ahead and print this.

The reason I say that is it's so small, your printer may not even capture this and print it out, it may just skip right by it, and you wouldn't see it at all. Another reason to completely leave it alone, is that if you're going to paint it, a layer of paint will cover this up, it's so small. And finally the third reason, is if you really insist, you can go ahead and sand it down. A lot of people have to do cleanup on their models. But for those who are super nerds, and don't like seeing that, we're going to proceed to one extra step.

So I'm going to get rid of this guy. I'm going to go to the explode, and right-click to extract the surface, and we're going to take that sphere we just created, right back out, and then hit Delete. We can close this guy here. So now we've got a really clean hole. So any way you can close this is fine, it should be sealed up tight, because we've removed that naked edge and point. I like to always try the surface menu and look for planar curves. If it's not too curving, this is actually the simplest solution, so let's try that first.

Now you'll see that my sphere kind of broke up some of these edges, which is totally fine. Let's right-click, and that looks like a really tight patch. However if you're too much curvature in this area, other commands you may want to try, is surface from edge curves. That will work as well, and if not just keep trying around. I've even done lofts to close things up. So whatever works is good. So this is a little floater here, I'm going to go ahead and Shift add the rest of the penguin, and then join them together.

Okay, so we get the blink. It's still open which we knew. Let's double check that that little patch doesn't have any additional naked edges. So we want to right-click up here in the command area, and show edges. So we're going to select the model, right-click, we still have nine naked edges, but this is not one of 'em. So that was a really simple cleanup patch work. And if you keep this in context, this is important, too many people zoom in, and obsess over stuff that you will never see.

So I'm turning off the iso curves, and I'm going to zoom out. So remember, this guy is about 100 millimeters tall, and that detail we were just working on was about half a millimeter at most. No one will ever know it's there, except you. So hey, don't tell anybody! Okay, let's close this up, and I want to summarize by saying the naked point problem happens most often with organic or complicated models, and it can be difficult to predict, and then almost impossible to fix.

I've developed a lot of my modeling procedures specifically to avoid this situation, since there is no official McNeel fix. Now, it's not that big of a deal, if you try my sphere hacknique.