Simple raised panel but curved ~ Is there a better/simplier method than the path I took?

Started with curved long line added tangent straight lines extending the ends so the intersecting profiles will be the same size.

Made wire outline at the 45 degree intersection for each corner and used the two rail sweep.

Seems like a lot of work so any suggestions?

Thanks

Maybe this, but the difficulty is to have a symmetric piece and found the good axe!
And a good orientation of the profil ;)
Except that, not a big deal :) Rail Revolve !
(sorry i hve not taken a good angle for the image so the profil is like a straigth line !)
Of course it's curved line as shown the result :)

Hi Abe, probably the way you are currently doing it is the best for the moment.

But one of the last things I'm trying to get in for MoI v2 is mitered corners for a 1-rail sweep, which would be what you want in this situation.

The goal for this is to enable this initial structure to produce your result:



So hopefully not too much longer before that works better.

Currently you can try to do a manual corner mitering but I'm not really sure that it would be any better than your other method.

If you are interested, it would go something like this - start by cutting your curves in half since you can mirror it in one direction:



Now do a one-rail sweep, which will produce a kind of sectioned result along each segment individually like this:



So that part is easy, but now those pieces need to be managed - they need to be separated and rejoined into different chunks, then the somewhat tricky part is that you've got to place an precisely angled plane in there as a cutting object, and trim each of them to it like this:



After the pieces are trimmed with that plane, you'll have the proper corner:





The part that I'm going to be working on for sweep will be doing that same kind of a thing, but automating all of that.

- Michael

Hi Abe, actually getting the proper cutting plane is not really that difficult, so the trimming method may be quicker overall than the other way.

The method for making the cutting plane goes like this - first draw a line with intersection snap from corner to corner:



Now select one of the neighboring line edges that touches it:



This forms a planar curve which can be extruded (you don't have to join first, extrude automatically joins pieces that touch one another), and the extrusion by default will go along the plane normal which is the orientation that you want:



Then you can delete the corner-to-corner line, and also the one face from the extrusion that you don't want to use.

That will produce a cutting plane at the proper orientation, you can select it and move it downwards maintaining the orientation by snapping on to the plane's own edge using the Transform / Move command like this:



Then grab a corner grip:



And scale it up so that it is nicely chopping cleanly through everything:



Then each of those pieces is cut by using the Trim command, with that plane as the cutting object.


Of course this will be much easier yet when it all happens automatically.

There will probably be cases when your shapes are not all in one plane where the mitering will not work, but here you have it all set up properly so that it matches up so I think this kind of non-planar situation should be feasible. (where it basically behaves like a planar situation in that local area).

- Michael

< Of course this will be much easier yet when it all happens automatically.
That will be perfect :)

Oops - one other note on creating the cutting plane - for the extrude part use the "both sides" option and then you can skip the step of moving the plane downwards after the extrusion.

- Michael

Greatly appreciate all the feedback, and detailed explanations.

I look forward when we can do mitres automatically.

Thanks again for MoI3D and all that contribute here.

Michael, I SWEAR this is the kind of information I hope you can put into some kind of User's Guide or Best Practices manual somewhere!

I've always had problems with doing shapes with corners like this causing me to shy away from doing them!

It probably due to me always trying to accomplish something in one go; I'd never think to let the corners come out ugly at first, and then go back and do a 45-cut and work it from there...

However, I really hope that the mitered corners DO make it into V2 to make this a simple 1-step operation as it should be.


But again, it's tips like this that teaches me more and more how to be a better NURBS modeler (I'm so polygon jaded unfortunately...)


-Will