Forum: Carrara

Subject: vertex and smoothing question

biggert opened this issue on Nov 30, 2004 ยท 8 posts

biggert posted Tue, 30 November 2004 at 10:57 PM

ok...i got a project. i want to model the energy sword of the Covenant in the Xbox game Halo. i included a (very) rough pic of the basic shape i want. i got C2.1 and am using the vertex room. my problem is no matter what i try, i cant seem to get the inner curve to show up when i smooth the model. there's always this angled corner on the right that always shows up even if i try repositioning the vertecies. after i draw the vertices i extrude to .1 and then smooth the model to 4. please help. ive had C2.1 sitting on my HD for quite a while but never realy used it to model anything "serious," and so i know i'm not doing something right. please help. thanks very much for any tips.

biggert posted Tue, 30 November 2004 at 10:59 PM

heres the basic shape i want.

brainmuffin posted Tue, 30 November 2004 at 11:45 PM

Carrara has a problem smoothing a crescent shaped polygon, so you'll have to link the vertices. extrude first, then link, then smooth, and you'll avoid pac-man syndrome. I had to figure this one out while making a moon-shaped belt buckle...

biggert posted Wed, 01 December 2004 at 12:18 AM

thanks very much for the very quick reponse brainmuffin. much appreciated. that solved my problem real quick. heres the result. thanks again! =)

brainmuffin posted Wed, 01 December 2004 at 12:22 AM

Glad I could help. That kind of looks like the can opener that the mouse wouldn't let sylvester have in that old cartoon...

Message edited on: 12/01/2004 00:23

PAGZone posted Thu, 02 December 2004 at 12:01 PM

Interesting "feature". Hey Brainmuffin, do you know if this "feature" is fixed in CS3 or 4? Regards, Paul

brainmuffin posted Thu, 02 December 2004 at 12:22 PM

Well, my example was made in C4Pro, so..... But it's a result of carrara's N-gons. Carrara is one of a small # of 3D programs that can have polygons with a virtually infinite # of sides, Biggert's "canopener", for example, has 14 sides. Most other progams won't fill in a polygon with higher than 4, possibly 5, sides. If you're building for export to another program, you'd have to do this anyway(I usually run almost everything through Poser5, even though I bring the poser files back into Carrara for rendering.). Also, if biggert or I had chosen to extrude on a different axis, we'd never have encountered "pac-man syndrome".

PAGZone posted Thu, 02 December 2004 at 1:16 PM

Ah. Thanks for the info. I think I get it. :-) I have not spent much time in the Vertex modeler, but I am about to start learning it. Thanks, Paul