Hi Everyone,

I am attempting to model an oil barrel and making slow progress.

I'm trying to make the hexagon shaped thing on the top, I've had a go at it and it looks kind of ok , but the geometry on the top of the barrel now looks messy.

Is there a better / cleaner way of doing this ?

Ref image :


model:

Er, floating geo?

That seems pretty effective. I would be tempted to float it as well but it would only save a few tris, not really worth it now that you went to the effort to join them.

But it really starts to fall into how, whatever engine its going into, handles floaters. If there is a UV seam around the cap, then it will create a hard edge when exported which means the cap will be floating and the barrel will have a hole in it. The verts will be doubled up around the holes but they'll share the same space so it won't look like a gap technically.

If you float it, make sure the verts of the cap are just above the top of the barrel a hair, that way if they are ever vertex lit they won't be inside a dark area and cause weird shadows.

Something like this? Or isn't this what you meant?

Thanks for the suggestions everyone, I hadn't really thought about floating geometry. For some reason I got it into my mind that each model had to be a single piece.

After a bit of experimenting it appears that the engine I am targeting handles floating geometry fine so in future I will probably use this technique in similar situations.

I'll probably not change this model to use floating geometry I'll continue on with it and see how it turns out in the end.

Thanks again everyone..

You can at least remove the centre vertex in the 8 sided top. Or do you use it to mirror the texture?