Yeah, MoI could do that, but these particular curves would have to be re-worked a bit. Here is a video that shows what Steve was talking about with regard to the joined surfaces. Fixing those, would allow a fillet in alot of those areas. In the last part of the video, i also show where, when you have an edge/angle that disappears or creates an issue for the filleter, you can trim the surfaces back and use the blend tool to fill in the gap. If you needed to do this, then this would need to be a "pre-thought" modeling method, because it would require you to have your surfaces extended "past the boundries" where you have defined the junctures, then trim them back. It wont work going to "Just the boundry", like you see in the video. This is Michaels explanation that the surfaces need to be created "larger", then trimmed.
If you need an example of what that looks like, i can present one here. You excluded the surfaces that had the more complex junctions from this model..
Michael - Thanks for the advice, it certainly explains why i was having problems doing the fillets and blends, will have to wait and see how it goes with this one. All of the patch's down the left side now marry up, that was fun killing curves and stealing edges - but at least it now forms on big mass. One thing for sure though Michael, after reverting back to Rhino to try some things, your interface was sorely missed and i soon became miffed with Rhino, MoI's surface construction is much cleaner too!
SteveMacc - Nice work with solid works, I tried it on a 30 day download but it was way to cumbersome for my delicate grey matter. However i have followed your advice and made all patch's unite. The enclosed 3DM now has the image guides embedded so feel free to have a play at smoothing the seams provided or creating your own from the prints.
Same applies to anyone, just be kind and show me how you would do it in MoI.
Hi BurrMan - Dude you went to some trouble to explain the process there. Sadly I was replying to Michael & SteveMacc and missed the video post, but i have watched it and it explains really well, I especially like the trick with the edge stealing and the offsetting - Lesson learnt and taken on board!
Well this third incarnation is definitely going better than the other two, but i need some help again ...
As can be seen from the first screen grab, this model is coming along,
But is there a more efficient way of creating this kind of grill, the two of those add 15mb to the file, that seems rather heavy. I have already exported them out as there are another eight of the blighters to do which will push the model over 70mb at this rate, they are a networked surface but are simple planes, so any pointers would be good.
Hi Martin, usually it is much more efficient to use texture mapping inside of your rendering program to do small repetitive patterned detail like that, rather than actually modeling it directly.
Thanks Michael, i know materials can save a huge amount of modelling, especially bumps and displacements and of course grid like items with holes. I just queried it as the those two grills alone are 15mb where as as a medium high resolution OBJ file (Angle 5, Divide 10 as planes) is 2mb in size, which is much more acceptable.
Hi Martin, yeah NURBS models have a higher overhead for things like edge structures, basically for every edge in a NURBS model there is a lot of various pieces of data including both a UV-space version of the edge as well as a 3D edge curve.
So when you get to a situation where you've got something similar to a polygon structure with just a lot of little planar faces and lots and lots of little edge curves, that is not very efficient data-size wise in a NURBS model as compared to a polygon model structure.
NURBS are more efficient in other kinds of ways, especially when your model has large sections of it made of curved surfaces, since a big curved thing can be exactly represented as one NURBS spline surface while with polygons you have to use a whole lot of little polygons to represent it.
For a case like you've got there, you'll probably be fine with those heavy pieces if you just break them out into a separate file (select them and use File > Export to put them in their own separate file and then delete them from your main working model) so that you won't bog things down so much with a huge file for your main working model.
A little more progress, the lower porting of the back-end of this Lamborghini is a lot more tricky than i first thought, also it's the first time modelling this area, no excuse i know, but sometimes i need a few goes to get things looking right! But i am happy with my artistic licence result ... What say you ?
Some more updates, this is getting more tricky and I am finding myself having to try and work from photos. If you are reading this Michael, any chance of some proper camera matching in v3 ?
@ Burrman - Glad you like it, and as you asked so nicely, and because we all like to sho off from time to time, here are two more screen grabs ...
> If you are reading this Michael, any chance of some proper camera matching in v3 ?
Usually camera matching is more associated with animation type functions, so it's not really on my radar for implementing in v3.
Are you trying to use a perspective angled reference image? Usually that type of image reference is problematic to use as a reference, you need to find things like top/front/side blueprint like reference images instead if you're trying to trace over stuff, since it's primarily intended for reference images in MoI to go on the Top/Front/Right views.
Hi Michael - Camera matching is probably the wrong term to use here, but yes trying to line up a reference photo rather than the normal top/left/right views. Hopefully this description may help explain what i think might work.
To be able to create an image plane in a perspective view only, which can then be rotated so as to be able to match up to straight lines and angles, enabling the end-user to be able to better approximate how far certain details protrude that are obscured from the normal flat 2d views
This will only be an external view type of thing, my skills are not up to doing interiors yet.
> I can imagine after tweaking on it for a month, it will be fantastic!
I hope it wont take that long, but you never know. This is what I love about NURBS, once those splines are in place the speed you can create surfaces is far superior to SubD - Well in my eyes at least. I hate to sound like a sales person for MoI, but given it's tool-set at present i am amazed at how well it is coping with this project, hopefully when it's completed i will have more time to play with trying to get an external renderer to play with MoI scenes directly.
Glad you are enjoying my suffering as much as i am - hehehehehe :)
> To be able to create an image plane in a perspective view only, which can then
> be rotated so as to be able to match up to straight lines and angles, enabling
> the end-user to be able to better approximate how far certain details protrude
> that are obscured from the normal flat 2d views
I don't really follow the rotation part of what you're describing here.
Normally that kind of perspective matching mechanism is a function in rendering or animation programs to make the virtual 3D camera line up with the position that the actual camera was at when taking a particular photo or video - that's so that newly rendered content can be added to the image.
It's a pretty involved process - there's a solver mechanism involved which may involve you drawing reference lines or picking reference points within the model and then the result of that is a camera position for where to put the camera for the 3D view which should then be locked in place and not free to rotate around anymore.
In order to implement that in MoI would require quite a lot of new systems to be implemented - a new system for applying an image onto the viewport that stayed as a kind of billboard always flat to the view, some UI mechanisms for managing those bitmaps, some UI for managing the perspective match process, some mechanism for locking the 3D view in place and UI for that, etc...
Really the biggest problem with all of that stuff is all the various chunks of UI that would be required - UI development tends to be very time consuming for me because I try to manage it in such a way to avoid things getting bloated or too complex. So usually I'm quite conservative about things that would require a lot of new UI to control it.
So anyway because of all that various stuff it's not too likely to be something added to MoI soon anyway.
Forgive my ignorance I seem to have over complicated things again ...
I thought a simple plane with a decal image that could be tilted/rotated on all axis combined with the zoom and pan options might have been enough to do a crude camera match. Being able to scale one side of the plane as required so as to create rhomboidal shapes to help with perspective issues.
It was just a thought, but as is often the case, a not very well thought out one - Lol
Reveton-01.3dm
