[Door] My First Attempt at Modelling a Door in Maya and subsequent issues

From the lectures and demonstrations on Monday and Tuesday I began modelling my door in Maya. I followed the method that Mark suggested, using the extrusion tool to build up my model from a square polygon, followed by realigning the vertices to my original design by using an image plane. Before going into Maya I had done a (to scale) sketch of what I wanted my door to look like. This was the result:

                                             (Front)                                                                           (Side)

After a short time I had managed to develop a rough outline of my door. Since my next step was going to be to export my door to Mudbox, I thought it would be a good idea at this stage to check to make sure my door would export correctly before I continued work.

After I exported my door into Mudbox, it appeared to work fine. This was until I began to try to subdivide my model, where I got the error message; “Cannot subdivide meshes with edges shared by more than two polygons!” Through research I found out that the most likely cause of this problem was that there were triangles somewhere in my mesh, and Mudbox can only divide meshes with 4-sided quads. After finding several triangles in my model, I managed to fix what I thought was the problem, but unfortunately I received the same error in Mudbox. I then tried using the Cleanup utility in Maya, but it couldn’t find any problems either.

 

At this point my stripped down model looked like this:

With very little information about this problem on the Maya help files or support forums, I tried several generic computer-associated fixes that often work with many applications. This included selecting all the visible parts of the mesh and duplicating followed by deletion of the original. I thought that there might be a hidden vertex; edge or face somewhere in my model and this might fix the problem. I also tried pulling vertices about using the move tool to try to see if there were double vertices somewhere on my mesh (which it said could be the problem in the Maya help files). Unfortunately neither of these solutions fixed my problem. By backtracking through my save files, not even the .003 or .004 saves subdivided in Mudbox correctly, and by talking to people I heard that the problem was very hard to fix due to a tiny discrepancy somewhere in my mesh.

At this point due to my limited knowledge of Maya, I believed that I tried to make the model too complex and rounded, and that is why Mudbox refused to subdivide it. For this reason, I decided to begin again but try to make my model more square-edged with less subdivision.