Making a cylinder more round without smoothing

osarusan-2189622

Forgive my very noob question. I just started with Hexagon and modeling very recently.

I am trying to make a wheel shape. I have an octagon-shaped cylinder, and I want to make it a little more smooth... more than 8 faces that is. But I don't want to enable smoothing because when I do that, it smooths the top and bottom edges too, and it turns into more of a pill shape than a wheel shape.

Can someone teach me either:
1) how to split the faces on the octagon so it looks more round?
or 2) if there is a way to enable smoothing only on some of the faces of a cylinder and not the "end caps"?

Thanks!

Wee Dangerous John

Not sure what sort of wheel you wanted so just guessing, when you first create a cylinder have a look at the Properties tab, it will tell you how many Points and Sections the cylinder will have, just before you press Validate.

A better (or different) way of doing it is to use one of the Circles from the Lines drop down.

osarusan-2189622

I see, that makes it easier to make one from scratch! Thanks!

So once it is made, there is not an easy way to add faces to make it more round?

Roygee

See the attached pic. When you first create a cylinder, you are given options as to how many sides and sections. See the ringed part on the pic - Pts/sec refers to the number of sides and sections refers to the divisions along its length. The more Pts/secs, the rounder it will be.

The first "wheel" is made of 24 points and one section.

To smooth without distorting the end-caps, loop-select the edges of the end-caps and using the Vertex modeling ->Edge tools ->Extract around, cut in two edges on either side, very close to the edge loops - see no 2.

No3 is the result of smoothing level1 and collapsing DG..

There are better methods than this of making wheels:)

Edit: Cross-posted with Wee Dangererous John :)

osarusan-2189622

Thanks! I understand. That makes a lot of sense now.