Hey peeps.
Attached is an image that will say more than words can, but hey, you came in this thread to read, right?
I know this is going to be stupidly simple, because I've spent hours trying to figure it out, and have probably stared at the solution the whole time. Anyways, what I want to do is remove the hard edge from two joining dome shapes that are pretty much perpendicular to each other. I've tried using rounder and all those tools, but to no avail. I'm aware the main problem is that I'm using simple geometry to create complex shapes, and that I should probably be using splines/curves/metabollocks/whatever, but I'm an amateur at this, and these are my baby steps.
Sooooooo... any suggestions on how I do this? I want to get a rounded edge from point A to point B. The Rounder tool crashes in disgust at the very thought of it, and none of the other tools that I've tried come anywhere close to what I want.
The second question is probably/maybe more a matter of opinion - Should I be rounding these edges as I create my mesh, or wait til the overall structure is finished, and then do the finite amount of edge softening etc. Atm, I'm guessing it's the latter, as doing it as I go will mean having to do the same work twice as pieces are cut away/added/reshaped versus waiting til the basic shape is finished and working around the complexity.
Cheers for any help in advance.
Posts
selecting your points for rounder may be a pain, but it handles stuff really well, usually if you've modelled well you won't have much cleanup to do
If you look at the attached image.
1, these points will throw up all kinds of rounding errors when applying rounder because there's only 1 edge attached to the point, it will only round the to the single edge it's connected to, ie, there's no second reference edge to round to.
2, I can't really tell what's going on in this area, but to round the edge from A to B you'd need to select all the points in this area and create a polygon, just temporarily to allow rounder to work, you can delete it afterwards, the same applies for the other side of the mesh.
I hop that helps, admittedly, no.1 isn't very clear, I can't think if any other way to explain it.
TheMightySpud
as for point 2 on the image (i really appreciate you went to the time to do that btw. cheers.), that's just basically a polygon i've deleted from the original geometry because i'm going to put a tail there.
basically i created an 100m x 15m radius disc. cut off the two sides at 87.5m. extruded what was left back 95m. created an 80m radius circle on the y plane, extrude down, boolean, and cut off the two back corners. created another disc on the x plane. extruded wide enough to create an undercarriage. boolean, deleted the cuts.
I think you've probably done a boolean to get that shape and you haven't cleaned it up properly, if you look closely at the points highlighted in the second image, and all the other points on that side you'll probably find they don't even connect, you'll have to manually weld those and try again, I've used rounder a lot and it will handle a mesh like that as long as you don't have unwelded gaps, booleans in LW are crap basically, the drill tool works a lot better
merge points is my friend.
as i'm so early into this mesh, i took your advice IRML and started again using drill rather than boolean. like i said, i got almost instant results using rounder for the top side of the mesh. on the underside i'm getting an error saying: A selected point is not inside the surface of the selected polygons (L138).
problem is, after a little bit of scouting and much frustration i've realised that point L138 isn't inside the selected region, but it also isn't selected. it's a point on the face of the shape and nowhere near what i'm trying to round.
The slacker.
M