Can't weld these dang nabbin edges together, help please! (n00b)

plugturtle

Apologies if Im posting in the wrong category Im new to the website!

Im attempting to model an imac 27 inch. I cant figure out how to weld these two parts together, on the left is the front and sides of the monitor and the on the right is the curved back part, i seperated it so i could tesselate and use ffd to curve it but now i cant figure out how to stick these two borders together!

When I attempt to use weld tool on the edges and vertices, only the corner verts of the front part of the monitor will weld to to the corner verts on the back piece as shown in the 3rd pic. I think I need to somehow match the amount of verts in the tesselate plane to the sides of the front monitor but i have no idea how.

Any help would be much appreciated! thank you.

musashidan

What's happening is that the corner verts have corresponding verts to weld to, the others do not. This results in an open border of a large n-gon. There are 2 ways to go from here: weld or collapse the four corner verts and cap them. This will result in large n-gons which can be further cleaned up now that the mesh is watertight. The cleaner method is to add more topology to the front and bridge the edges. Edgeloop termination from dense to sparse is one of the basic concepts of understanding topology, and modeling in general. It is vital for both subdivision and polygonal modeling.

Max is smarter than other 3d programs in that it often won't let you create illegal topology.

Another way to do this would have been to leave the mesh solid, tessellate the back face, select the verts of the tessellation(you can also stack a modifier for this), apply an ffd mod to the selection.

The topology really depends on what the model will be used for ultimately. 

plugturtle

musashidan said:

What's happening is that the corner verts have corresponding verts to weld to, the others do not. This results in an open border of a large n-gon. There are 2 ways to go from here: weld or collapse the four corner verts and cap them. This will result in large n-gons which can be further cleaned up now that the mesh is watertight. The cleaner method is to add more topology to the front and bridge the edges. Edgeloop termination from dense to sparse is one of the basic concepts of understanding topology, and modeling in general. It is vital for both subdivision and polygonal modeling.

Max is smarter than other 3d programs in that it often won't let you create illegal topology.

Another way to do this would have been to leave the mesh solid, tessellate the back face, select the verts of the tessellation(you can also stack a modifier for this), apply an ffd mod to the selection.

The topology really depends on what the model will be used for ultimately. 

Wow I didnt expect a response like that, thanks for explaining. Feel bad now that youve gone in depth and I've decided to bail on that model, turns out it got a whole lot more complicated after adding chamfers on the monitors corners to get that curvy apple look. Decided to start on something easier, a chewing gum bottle. Thank you though.

poopipe

You should  be able to bridge that gap with one click in border mode.  You'll have to do cleanup after so the solution offered is probably the least confusing option