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Wow! Thank you so much Tim and Roy. These are great explanations. I guess I can turn in my homework now. My method of making the arch was not all that different from Tim's. I inserted a cylinder, extruded the sides, use scale tools to flatten the sides and top, deleted the back and the center, then added thickness. For my UV mapping, I put seems so that the front face, one side, and back face were part of the core, then put in extra cuts to make the other sides fold out.
Not horrible, but not great either.
I really appreciate you both going to such detail. This is why I love the Carrara forum. Now for that pin thing, hmmmm.
Many, many ways of skinning this cat :)
This window arch was made using four polylines and the ruled surface tool.
Quite ironic - in another thread Hexagon was being accused of instability - I got a nil pointer error when unfolding, so completed the task in Hex with no problem:)
gonna try it with the gordon thingee. enamored of it, :lol:
is there a way to verify which drawing plane is selected?
had a couple of arch fails. :lol:
the 'snap to grid' checkbox registered in my brain. makes life easier.
found the grid settings.
was trying out the double sweep tool. thought i could do half the arch, then mirror and bridge.
first put down a rectangle
used polyline for one side.
then tried the curve one.
looking messy.
>.<</p>
practice ... :)
is there an option to constrain z-axis for polyline making ?
i tried moving the verts with snap to on, but it didn't go flush with the wall.
doh, it's ctrl+click to select the drawing wall.
You can also pick one of the directional cameras. For example, if you use the top camera (menu in upper left chooses camera) in the vertex modeling room, you can use polylines to draw on the floor. Then switch back to the directors camera, select the polyline, duplicate, and raise the second up (adjust if you want) duplicate again, raise again, etc. Then you can use one of the tools. Loft comes to mind for this example. You use the left camera and draw on the right wall, etc.
Because you can put reference pics in the directional views, the camera approach can be very helpful.
Loft looks fun, will try practice loft next :)
then i'd like to try making something with coon.
with a little more confidence, on to trying some splines
The surfaces tools are really good at getting smooth, flowing shapes for, especially, things with elements of geometric and organic shapes, such as motorcars. From what I've seen, even in the Hexagon forum, much underutilized.
I prefer modeling in carrara to anything else and creating shading domains in it ready to be UV mapped but since I got UUW3D I do not even try to UV map in it.
While it works ok on low poly mesh the poor thing just chokes on more, it may be my computer, forget redoing DAZ figures and clothes.
UUW3D will cope with quite high poly stuff and since I am not so much of a modeler as a tweaker of existing mesh to suit my needs I find it way more suitable for my workflow.
One thing to be aware of is making sure that you distribute your geometry evenly where possible. If you look at your normals, you can see the odd shading. This is because you pulled everything up to make your square outer arch and it made some faces very long and skinny. What I did instead was to create the inner arch in much the same way as you did, but with a circle instead of a cylinder (just another way, but less geometry so I can get my shape correct). I then created the outer arch and made sure there was an even distribution of points to go with the inner arch. I bridged and then extruded to make the completed arch. This will give you better normals.
Thanks, Chris. For this. I have improved geometry compared to my first try, and a slightly different uvmap. I did get the uvmap to be one continuous unfold and you can see the underside of the arch sticking down. It would probably be better to detach the underside of the arch?
Diomede, are all the front vertices at the same Y position so they are flat? Something is looking odd. http://prntscr.com/6243bu
Second, as a suggestion. You want to get the most space on your UV space.
This is very helpful. I think the oddity you are seeing is because the curve of my arch is elongated rather than a circle, but just to make sure, I scaled each face to zero then generated a new uvmap. I took the opportunity to detach and place the underside of the arch to the side, but for the moment kept the front and back faces and one side connected just to double check my unfolding at the corners of the pillars. I will try more efficient use of space separately.
Still not great, but definitely less horrible because of helpful suggestions. Thanks again. Happy to receive additional feedback, and additional "homework" to better learn how to uvmap in general, and how to use the unwrap function in particular.
And to everyone following along, going back to Misty's original question, any tips related to seams/pins/cuts/stitches would be greatly appreciated.
One thing to be aware of is making sure that you distribute your geometry evenly where possible. If you look at your normals, you can see the odd shading. This is because you pulled everything up to make your square outer arch and it made some faces very long and skinny. What I did instead was to create the inner arch in much the same way as you did, but with a circle instead of a cylinder (just another way, but less geometry so I can get my shape correct). I then created the outer arch and made sure there was an even distribution of points to go with the inner arch. I bridged and then extruded to make the completed arch. This will give you better normals.
i've been experimenting with the snap to grid to align my arch verts with precision. but the snap to is drifting off the gridlines.
is there anything i can do?
thanks!!
I think you're getting some smoothing going on. If you crease the front and back edges of the arch, it'll be much flatter.
Further to Chris's suggestion re. laying out the arch in pieces. Don't forget that you can place the back of the arch over the top of the front. You'll get the same texture on both sides, but this probably won't matter, since you can't see them at the same time.
The next thing I want to try is a rock. A big flat topped rock that sticks out the side of a hill, maybe with a bit of an underhang and some strata and a nasty crack running through it. I'm sure it'll need pinning and careful thought to the seams. But first I have to work out how to build it...
Draw your shape with a polyline, fill it, then use the extrude tool to move it up, changing the size and the amount you move it up each time.
Oh yeah, displacement painting is your friend (after the UVs are set up).
was determined to do it double sweep.
:)
several hours of false starts.
welded together 2 polylines with a quarter of an oval for the arch side.
duplicated with symmetry and bridged.
couldn't get it to go to the drawing plane without it flattening into 2 dimensions, had to bridge it
tried it with a stone shader :)
needs some smoothing. and deco details.
and gotta get some sleep. :lol:
what's next? :)
Your thread - you decide :)
a difficult thing i can think of is a spring coil.
can such a thing uvmap without distortion? :blank:
what nifty construction tool would model this ea z pea z?
is there an equivalent to the 'edge loop cut' like in wings?
wanna try the ruled construction today. :)
i don't understand coon. the manual shows a sloped plane
Can't resist being the straight man for Roy and Hex. For Carrara, I am going to give a couple of roundabout methods for the spring coil. I actually recommend #2 for your present purpose.
1) Formula modeler along with formula texture, probably most efficient from a computing resources standpoint - Oh No!!!!!
see #5 of http://gianp.free.fr/carrara/carrara98.html
2) Spline object, circle on drawing plane, pipeline method, spiral preset, convert to other modeler, choose vertex model, then untriangulate mesh
3) Vertex modeler, construct oval, use curved polyline to create spiral sweep path, then sweep
I'm sure others have a more efficient method.
I think there is an actual plugin for this kind of shape, but I might be getting mixed up with another program.
EDIT: to add my attempt to uvmap unfold - I selected the edges at the caps and created seams, and I selected two edges lengthwise and hit loop (and minor adjustment) to create a seam for the spirals. The lengthwise spiral uvmap still has a little waviness which hopefully a pin or two could address - but I really need help with pins. :red:
OK - let's do this thing properly :)
Hexagon - insert helix, specify number of twists, add thickness and number of sides, hit close all to add end caps.
To unwrap - place seams around end caps, do a loop seam, add two pins, unwrap.
Compare the wobbly unwrap to the ruler-straight one
:)
intimidated by formulaes :shut:
Indeed!! :-):-):-)
Hex is superior.
Although I think the wobbly uvmap for my Carrara one was the pilot (me), not the plane. I need to learn how to do the pins. Do some pins for me in Carrara and straighten out that uvmap, Tim!
i think i saw something about twists in ca.
bridge with twists?
just waiting for a render to finish, mystic gorge with caustics on
my home pc only has 2 buckets.
You can set the number of twists in CA if you use the spline modeler (which you can then convert to a vertex model and untriangulate the mesh). There may be another place, but that one comes to mind.
You can set the number of twists in CA if you use the spline modeler (which you can then convert to a vertex model and untriangulate the mesh). There may be another place, but that one comes to mind.Lately I have been coming up with (in my mind) all sorts of shapes that I want to make using the Spline modeler - where I would have normally just gone into the Vertex modeler. I really need to get into that thing and start getting into using it much more often!