how to close a mesh?

A closed mesh is where each triangle's edges match up side by side. An open mesh is where this isn't true such as the model being broken up into parts and pieces. To close a mesh, just have it so that the edges of every triangle in your model's mesh meet up and not be "exposed".

Open meshes can sometimes render faster due to fewer vertices and polygons to render, but don't allow for stencil shadows. Why bother creating more vertices and faces for a part of something you never see such as the underside of a terrain or the roof of a building if you can't get high enough to see it? With open meshes, there's also the advantage of having several small, low-poly models placed in one single entity to speed up rendering of such things.

ulillillia ,


Am I to understand corectly that all I need to do to close a
mesh is move the parts into one another?

Oh and The reason I need them closed is it appears down the
barrel of the gun to the mid base section...
when looking dead on at it down the barrel it looks
very bad like parts are missing or something...

But from all other angles it appears quite fine.


I will play around some more in MED and see if
I can get this to work as you stated.


*** Teutonic Darkness ***

Perhaps it may be because some of the normals aren't facing the right way. Go into the menus of MED and look for a configuration setting for the 3D view to draw backfaces. Backfaces are untextured and have a dark bluish-gray color by default. If you see such faces that shouldn't be like that, go into face mode, select those faces, then click the "flip normals" button.

It could also be that you haven't built some of the faces or they were built incorrectly (from which you'd see in the 2D views as triangles going to odd or unusual areas and would stick out quite well).

If otherwise, please post a screenshot of what you're seeing.

It can be quite simple to close your mesh by adding faces (triangles) to the opening of your barrel. There is a "add face" tool in MED in which you select three vertices at a time in clockwise order and add a face spanning those vertices. That's how you can close up the hole.

hope this get the mesh closed,
cheers,
tindust

Somteimes open meshes are better. Think of a dumb bell (poll with two circles on each end) to make this a closed mesh you would need quite a few more triangles than to just make 3 models, 2 balls and the poll, and place them together.

In the end you should do whatever looks better and gets better performance, if you can't have both then choose the lesser of the two evils.