double edges

Xsi
1

hi there!

im currently working on the mclaren f1 street car.
im using polygons/subD plus curves for orientational help.

as we all know, the f1's curves are sexy but not that easy to follow. aslo i'm still pretty new to xsi too so here's the problem:
i'm now modeling the door of the car out of grids, which points follow the curves i made earlyer. that seems to be a very common technique.
i already did the upper part (the one the windscreen fits in). then i started the lower part of the door (with that air-inlets).
then i merged the two parts. no problem. but now i want to continue modeling on the new merged geometry.

but when i try to make new polygons xsi tells me that it cant do so, because of different surface normals of the polygons i want to add a new one to (or something, i think u know what im talking about). xsi could make it a double edge. but i definitly dont want that.
so the question is: is there a way to "relax" the geometry. to make all normals (or whatever caused that message) go into same direction? freezing doesn't help with this.

my mesh is far from being "clean", and that seems to be the problem for xsi. inserting some new vertices here adding a polygon there, merge this with another peace of geometry...all that seem to have confused xsi and me a little.

so, is there a way to make this work, or do i have to do that door part again? is there a way to get xsi show me graphically where i can add polys and where not (is there a visibility option for that, i know where to turn on normals'n stuff, but thats not it).

im not really clear about the whole double adge thing/what causes the problem ..think' i gotta have a look into the manual (beside posting here
any information regarding this problem would be very useful!
thx in advance! cya

...sorry for the baad english, hope u understand what im talking about

2

Freezing won't help because that's to do with the modifier stack, unless you mean freezing transforms which won't help either because that's to do with co-ordinates - neither operation will affect the shape or make-up of your mesh.

If XSI is giving you a message about normals not matching you should select the poygons who's normals are wrong and invert them - if I understand your problem then this should fix it. You can make normals visible by clicking the eye icon at the top edge of a given viewport, and selecting normals from the list.

Unfortuanetly XSI doesn't (I don't think) currently have a tool that will unify normals across a mesh so you have to do it yourself.

As for the double-edge problem, this should only occur if you try and draw your polygons backwards - XSI defines the surface normals direction of a new polygon from the direction (clockwise or anticlockwiwse) that you draw the polygon - if you're in the process of doing this, XSI will detect that the edges you're drawing are backwards (compared with surrounding polygons) and will cause double edges/inverted normals, and so XSI produces the warning that (I think) you're being given.

Hope this helps some

jON