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Hmmm... interesting. Brain freeze... I can't picture/understand the one side coming together. WIll have to try it when brain thaws out. :)
When you lathe a shape there is usually a side of the shape that acts as the axis, let's call it the Axis Side.
So, select the polygon to be lathed, but Ctrl-Extrude it instead, so that the extrusion is at right angles to the poly and the extruded poly is the same size. With the extruded poly still selected, choose rotate and use the top right dialogue to rotate it 15 degrees in the desired direction. If you now go to the Top view (I am assuming the Axis Side of the original poly was vertical), select the Move (Translate) tool and move the poly so that the Axis Side on the new poly is in the same place as that side on the original shape - from the top it will look like a 15 degree wedge shape.
Now if you repeat this a couple of times, you will have a 45 degree shape with three divisions. You could of course choose a smaller angle and do it more times, or you can smooth or subdivide the shape with three divisions to get a smoother result. You could also merge points along the Axis Side as you will have four points for each point on the original, all in more or less the same position in space.
Is this any clearer? It is probably quicker to do it than to describe it!
I think rock livrette meant something more like Blender's modifiers where you can add a spin modifier and it produces a similar resul to lathet, but if you decide much later that you don't like how it came out then the original line is still there and you can change it and cause the final spun/lathed shape to update too. I don't really know how often that comes up for this particular tool since you see the result right away and can just control-z, but for some other things it's pretty useful.
With "linked to the form" I ment: After sweeping once manipulating the sweep path again doesn't change the created form accordingly - it has no "link" to it any more. If you want to modify the form (with the path) you have to start all over again. If it stayed "linked".........
maybe quicker than i'm doing now
there no edge loop cut to carve out a 45 degree chunk. been doing the select polys, copy/paste thing. the marquee select a bit cumbersome on other than 180, 90,
its an inner turmoil not to go to wings where i know how to do this.
but i feel is worthwhile to learn it in carrara.
Did you try this method offered by Mark? I was able to manually enter the number 24 in the properties tray of the lathe tool to get the correct number of sections. The rest was judicious deleting and filling polygons.
yep, judicious deleting
need to tie a string on my finger to remember to delete the initial lathe frame.
Oh yes of course. Sorry... forgot about CTRL-extrude. Doh.
Got it. That would sure help to shape the object after the fact.
Kewl... Never knew there was a properties tray for lathe. Have to remember to keep my eyes open for it.
It's there for most of the tools, either with additional options for how the tool works, or to allow you to enter specific values for when you need more accuracy.
I have used the options for other tools. I did know about the properties tray for lathe but only used the +/- keys before... I was hoping that there were more options that I'd not seen other than the one as pointed out by diomede.
BTW: Worked on your explanation, thanks, for using extrude, rotate and move instead of lathe a bit today for 15 degree wedge. One try worked out fairly good... started over again and messed up something so quit... need to start again so saved the polygon unmodified for when I get back to it again.
I want to turn a bumpy plane into a solid.
The sensible approach seems to be sweep... but there are so many polygons I can't wrangle it with a mouse. Is there a numerical way to tell Carrara 'yeah, sweep X much'?
There's Thickness, but it does weird stuff.
Not sure I am following you and it could just be that I am misinterpreting what you mean by sweep. When I use the sweep tool, the number of sections in the resulting solid can be controlled by the number of points on the polyline used for the sweep. In the attached, the polylines follow a similar path but one has more points. As a result, the sweep uses more sections and it looks a little smoother. If the polyline were to only extend 1 point from the initial shape, then the sweep tool would mimic extrude. Am I on the wrong track?
On the chance that you meant to thicken a plane, I did another test. I inserted a terrain and converted it to a vertex model to get a bumpy plane (more than 130,000 polygons!). I then inserted a grid with just four points scaled up to roughly the same size as the terrain. I made sure the plane did not intersect the terrain from below. After setting the selection tool to "line", I selected the entire new grid (but only its lines actually select) and then used loop a couple times around the outer edge of the terrain. Now with the outside edges of the plane and the terrain selected, I clicked the bridge tool and hit ENTER to accept the default number of sections. Note, the bottom plane will now be an n-gon unless you address it.
Thickness works quite well, so long as you keep it to a minimum - just enough to create a back and front, then you can drag them apart. Too much thickness, and things will start to look like an invasion from the dungeon dimensions - a little goes a long way! There was another thread discussed it quite recently, or it might have been this one a few pages back.
The thickness thing was my suggested way of doing it, and it is described in more detail on page 5 of this very thread, bottom half of the page.
It deja vu all over again!
Will, pnewhook asked how to do what I think you mean Here on page 5. PhilW's mention, a very good and easy way, follows a few posts later. I tried it as PhilW described and it works great.
Message to All. I add links on page as I run across ones mentiong modeling in order to keep them all in one place. This will cause posts to eventually get moved to later pages.
It might be helpful to check the 2nd post on Page 1 every couple months or more to get newly added links. Hmmm... perhaps I should mark the added ones as "added mm/dd/yyyy". Let me know what you think.
Question: I have 2 or more, right now 14, vertex objects I would like to merge together so that I can edit them as one single vertex object. Is this possible without using boolean/union in the Assembly room? Currently I have a vertex block which will be duplicated or copied to equal 7 blocks and 7 letters spelling out Carrara. I have Carrara as both a text object and also a vertex object, whichever I decide to use.
This is for Carrara Challenge #27: "Carrara 9 Give Us a Sign" WIP Thread. Find my latest WIP There which I posted today and is only for the letter "C".
It's a bit tedious, but you can copy and paste from one vertex object to another. So if you have 14 objects, you would need to copy 13 of them and paste them all into the 14th to combine them.
Cool...That will work very good. It won't be that many objects... now that I think of it. The "Carrara" is actually only 1 vertex object and the cube is 1 more. I was thinking that I'd have to do each letter separately in Assembly room. The tedious part will be lining each letter up with their own cube. Hmm... wonder what will happen to their material zones when they get pasted... no matter I'll find out and all work out in the end. :)
@wgdjohn - For future reference, if you have a large number of vertex objects you want to combine, you can group them and export the group as .OBJ and then immediately import it back into Carrara. The imported object will have everything combined into one vertex object. This will also maintain their spacial relationship to each other and all of their material zones, although you may need to reapply the shaders.
One caution on this method: if you have unconverted smoothing on any of the vertex objects, exporting to OBJ will convert the smoothing and increase your poly count, so unless that is your intention, or it just doesn't matter, be sure to set smoothing to 0 on everything first and then reapply any smoothing you need once you import the OBJ back into Carrara. The same thing will happen with modifiers added in the Assembly room - any cool bends, twists, etc you've added will be converted to actual polys on export, which could potentially add tens of thousands polys to your object (I don't think this applies to your particular case, just a note for others out there.)
That's awesome! Thought I've not done it yet, I've always loved that Carrara could do this! :)
Hey fellow Carraraist Modelers! Just a quick FYI, for your (and my) convenience, I've decided to Add a Links list to other threads of Interest....
And then if that gets lost in the pages of progress, you can always perform a: I've added some new links to my Links Index for your pleasure! ;)
Oh... and those page numbers we can click on to get to specific pages in the thread... we can copy those links too! So for example, a link to Page 1 of this thread will take the link clicker to the first post of this thread! Just right-click the "1" and Copy Link Address, and then select the text you want to become the link, click the link button and paste the address into the url slot! Sweet!
I'm really glad you've started this thread and keep adding to it to keep it growing. It a really fun read! :)
Thanks Dart, I'll have to remember to add an "updated links post" directed back to the links when I update them.
BTW: The cube(s) in my current Carrara Challenge WIP are based on the above cube which I learned how to bevel earlier here.
Thanks to all who are helping out with Tips and answering questions... I appreciate your help *very* much.
Actually only turned out to be 4 objects cube, C, A, R and 9 which didn't worked but not as I wanted... see my later remarks.
Thanks very much... figured there was a way to do what I wanted. I'd been wondering how at other times and will help for future vertex objects. It did not work out for me with what I'd asked about since I wanted the letters to have the ability of casting shadows On or Off... forgot about that... ended up creating the letters C, A, R and 9 as text objects via Assemby room. My new vertex cube has shadows on with Carrara 9 shadows off... latter with shadows on didn't look good in this case. Now... what vertex objects had I wanted to combine earlier.... hmm... have to take a look after my WIP for Carrara Challenge #27: “Carrara 9, Give us a Sign” WIP Thread is done.
DesertDude just added a good explanation and examples of how, what can be done with, Sweep and the Bend/Twist modifiers in the above mentioned Carrara Challenge. His post is over there of course. DesertDude's explanation explains even more.
Good call, wgdjohn! Good call!
Thanks for linking wgdjohn!
Meanwhile, I thought I'd share something I stumbled upon a few weeks ago and it suddenly became useful for what I am currently working on. Sorry if this is already well known, but anyway, if you want to create oval/cartoony eyes and have the iris and pupils conform to the surface even when rotated wildly around try parenting 2 spheres to a Target Helper Object, then scale the Target Helper. In my YouTube example, I used 2 vertex spheres, perfectly round and applied a texture map for the iris and pupils. I then parented them to a Target Helper and scaled that 50% larger on the Z axis, which creates oval shapes. Now when the spheres are rotated, the texture conforms to the new surface and the oval shapes don't "tumble" from end to end, if that makes sense. You can even parent other objects to the spheres and they will conform to the oval shape, but you might have to rescale them. Also, I had to squish my texture map horizontally a bit to get the iris and pupil more round because the map of course stretched with the spheres. Could have many other uses.