And a single central cylinder would be one object in Modo, while four individual windows would be four objects in Modo?

Cylinder and use the highlighted trim edges to trim the window (you could extrude that shape to use as multi-surf trim), then you get a non-intersecting render tight facade.

Hi Tony - if I understand you correctly you want to get like 4 cylinder fragments to make glass panes?

Will these need to be solids, or is it ok to have a surface fragment there?

Basically instead of doing a boolean you're going to probably want to get a base surface in there and use Edit/Trim to cut it with those existing edge curves.

It will probably be easiest to do an "untrim" to recover the original surface of the outer piece without needing to create a new one, I will show you some steps in a minute here.

- Michael

Hi Tony, here are some steps.

First start by selecting this face from your object:



Do an invert selection, and then Delete, to get just this piece by itself:



Next select one edge on one of the panes. By selecting one edge you set the window selection to target edges.



Then do a window select like this to select the other edges:



Note that I selected from left to right here. Starting from the left and going towards the right will only capture things strictly inside the window. This kind of selection window will show with a solid outline (for the rectangle itself I mean). If you go starting from the right and going towards the left it will instead target anything that intersects the window even partially which can be good in different situations. That "crossing window" shows up as a dashed window outline instead of solid outline.

Anyway, that is the quick way to get all these pertinent edges selected.

Now do a Ctrl+C to copy the curves of those edges to the clipboard, then hit Delete, which will "untrim" the surface and remove these holes to recover the underlying surface. That will produce this now:



Now do Ctrl+V to paste in the curves, you will have this now:



Clear the selection and select just the main surface:



Run Edit/Trim and select the curves as the cutting objects. Then you will still be in the Trim command and it will ask you to pick which pieces to discard (or which to keep if you flip the mode) or you can hit Done/right-click there to keep all pieces if you want.

In this case select this outer piece to discard:



And then that should produce your window panes:




I think that is what you were trying to do, but let me know if I didn't understand correctly.

Basically this is getting into some of the surface-level modeling tools instead of the solids modeling tools.

Hope this helps!

- Michael

Thanks for all the replies - I'm at work at the moment so I'll try these out tonight.


Grendel - I was hoping to make it all one mesh and tag the windows with a different material.

Micheal - this looks more like what I had in mind.

I'll let you know how I get on. Cheers.

Finally got a chance to work on this. I used a slight variation on Michael's method. I used the inner curve of the fillet, created the surface then shelled it to the distance of the surface between the two fillets. I then scaled it up very slightly to make sure it intersected the surrounding geometry and booleaned it to the main housing.

Thanks for all the advice.

So now this is all one piece.



Here's a render:


and just for fun, I turned the main light off:

Cool mood of mad scientist laboratory! :)

Very nice model and render.


Excellent work.




- Steve

Hello Ash. Awsome. Just for my info, if its all one piece your software can recognize the original individual pieces to shade seperatley? I hadnt triedf to experiment but was under the impression that one peice, one object, one material overall.

If you have time,
Thanks.

Burr
Surprised at that question? Am I missreading?
One of the problems is limiting the number of parts that are in an object made in MoI. As they come from the file save can drive you crazy sorting them out to groups where the groups could share a similar shader.

If only MoI could export save the parts with the names given them in there!

Though Carrara can open nearly all of the MoI file types I tend to stick with 3dm or .obj,

Brian

Nice job there Tony!
You chose the right colours for the cabinet being a 50's object, I remember working as an apprentice on machinery that was probably from that era and they were those colours, dull beiges and greens.

Cheers

Nice glow effect on the elements!

- Michael

If I make a cube in MoI and import it into Carrara, I apply a shader to the cube. It doesnt allow me to apply a different shader or material to six different sides. If I make the cube. cut a hole, and insert another object to use as a window, when in Carrara I can apply the different shaders to each object.

Maybe it does, but I am not a renderer so I was asking to clear up how he did that with one solid. :)

Burr
Nice to know you have limits! (I don't have kneel anymore?)

Pretty basic stuff to render--select flat mapping and add shader to each side as required.

YELL OUT---Carrara is a peach to use--only to happy to help.

Brian

Thanks Brian. Been dying to get into rendering! Jealous of stuff like Danny and Grendels work!

http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2760092

Have a good look at this recent fun thread of mine--more associated with it on the DAZ forums also---LOTS of fun and learning!

Brian

>>If I make a cube in MoI and import it into Carrara, I apply a shader to the cube.
>>It doesnt allow me to apply a different shader or material to six different sides.

Hi Burr,

As Brian mentioned, you can make planer mapping for a cube. You also have the option of creating shader domains, which could also be used for a cube,but, shader domains can be used for any object with any number of sides and each side (or face) can be given a different color.

Thanks for all the replies people.

Hi, BurrMan
>>
2347.12 In reply to 2347.9
Hello Ash. Awsome. Just for my info, if its all one piece your software can recognize the original individual pieces to shade seperatley? I hadnt triedf to experiment but was under the impression that one peice, one object, one material overall.
>>

I used modo for this. No, it doesn't recognise the individual pieces, it's all one mesh. I select the polygons and assign them to a different polygon tag for use with a different material, in this case glass. Note that only the housing is all one piece. The rest of the parts in the renders are still seperate.

It's all just experimentation at the moment, trying to find the best way from MoI to modo. I'm learning modo's texture system as I go along too, and getting into a few pickles along the way :-)

Still, it seems to be coming along okay. I am also experimenting with reducing the polygon count (which was over 1.2 million) by the use of instances and re-meshing using the new beta.

I created the thing as mostly seperate parts, which to my mind, it is more realistic. But if it is all one mesh then you can use things like modo's weight maps to put dirt and grime into corners. If you don't do this then you have to paint them on, which means UV stuff - and that's a whole new skill I haven't got to grips with yet ;-)

I'll keep you posted with my progress

Hi Tony,

As you are modo user....
Is Modo can work like ( rhino + t-spline ) ? I mean to bidirectional read between polygon and nurbs ?

>> Thanks Brian. Been dying to get into rendering! Jealous of stuff like Danny and Grendels work!

BurrMan,

It's not so hard - but very time consuming. You tweak and render and tweak and render and....yes, more tweak and render. But I find it very satisfying to see the end result.

Carrara has a great procedural shading system, especially if you add some of the Digital Carvers plugins. That's why I don't know anything about UV mapping :-)