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LW 9 - Removing hard edges from complex geometry

ScatterScatter0 Posts: 0Member
edited March 2007 in Technical Questions and Answers #1
Hey peeps.

Attached is an image that will say more than words can, but hey, you came in this thread to read, right? :D

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.
Post edited by Scatter on

Posts

  • IRMLIRML253 Posts: 1,993Member
    #2
    rounder should do that no problem, but you probably should be making shapes like that with Sub-Ds

    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
  • TheMightySpudTheMightySpud1 Posts: 0Member
    #3
    Okay, after seeing this, I can see two main problems why Rounder won't work in doing what you want it to.

    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
  • ScatterScatter0 Posts: 0Member
    #4
    christ, i didn't even think of turning those points into a new polygon. sounds like a plan MightySpud, i'll give that a try.

    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.
  • IRMLIRML253 Posts: 1,993Member
    #5
    TheMightySpud wrote: »
    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.
    personally I don't think that's why rounder isn't working on it, but it has made me realise what is likely to be causing the problem

    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
  • ScatterScatter0 Posts: 0Member
    #6
    yeah, i just found the problem.

    merge points is my friend. :D
  • IRMLIRML253 Posts: 1,993Member
    #7
    don't rely on automated plugins though, you should be checking manually, booleans leave points shifted away from each other so merge alone won't do, you'd have to do merge with a fixed distance, and that can always cause trouble on more complex meshes, if you do it manually you always know what you've done to the model, and as long as you clean up as you go along you'll not have to do loads at once
  • ScatterScatter0 Posts: 0Member
    #8
    ok. i've managed to round both top sides of the mesh. but now i'm getting an error trying to do the underside.

    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. :(
  • mattcmattc181 Perth, AuPosts: 322Member
    #9
    Ikeda really needs to fix Rounder to work with edges.

    The slacker.

    M
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