[SOLVED][How-to?] adjacent object meshes seamless

arthenics

Hello,

For several projects, I'm facing a recurring problem : how to make adjacent meshes seamless? How to make it a clean way? What are the good practices?
To give a few examples : EVE in Wall-E have seamless interlocks, or the doors for airplanes. For the colors and textures, there are ways for cheating, but making the edges invisibles, I wonder what is the best approach.

felis

If you want it seamless, I would say it should be modelled together, and then just having its own material zone.

If you want it to be able to open you of course need the separet mesh. If you are thinking of a door in an airplane, you can still see where it is when closed. Here I think I would use matching meshes, i.e. mesh that could be bridged, just with a slightly gap. 

Padone

One way is to model a single mesh, then separate the part that you want seamless by leaving an extra loop at the edge, then make the extra loop invisible with a tranparent material.

Another way is to use custom normals at the edges, theoretically, but practically I was never able to make it work myself.

arthenics

I still have to sharpen my knife (I mean to practice) but I've found a way (or more accurately received help) in Blender. With the sharpen edge option (shift+E), we can create some kind of constraint.

See : https://blenderartists.org/t/how-to-adjacent-object-meshes-seamless-make-invisible-edges/1441659/4

SDev

Btw, if you go subd, don't forget to have a look at vertex crease, which is very helpful when you have more complex meshes :)

just a simple example how they work.

https://youtu.be/FQuBNb1E5Wg

ps: there are few situations I would go rather with support loops than with creases, especially if you have to export the mesh...