Daily Blender Secrets - Filling complex N-gon shapes like leaves

In this example, I've traced the outline of a leaf. Pressing F fills it with one N-gon. It is perfectly flat and can't bend at all. Pressing Alt+F Fills it with triangles. Follow that up with Alt+J to remove some unnecessary triangles. Now we can bend it a bit, but you get these artefacts. A third method is by first creating a Plane with subdivisions and then placing it above the leaf. Then delete the faces from the subdivided plane. Fill the Leaf with a single N-gon by pressing F. Holding Shift, select the leaf and then the plane in Object Mode. Got to Edit Mode and use Knife Project. Now the Leaf has many square cuts and can bend well. There are still small N-gons but they don't cause shading issues at this scale. You can turn on Auto Merge and slide vertices by pressing G twice in order to clean up these parts, if you're into that sort of thing. Fun fact: many instanced high detail leafs are easier to render than many simple planes with alpha textures.

Channel: Blender Secrets

Views: 107,187

Keywords: blender, secrets, blendersecrets, tutorial

Id: sv9sa12d0yo

Length: 1min 0sec (60 seconds)

Published: Mon May 25 2020