Grab hold of the gizmo’s Z handle and move the mesh forward of the main object which you can now unselect and hide/lock. Fig 14. Follow this by selecting all of the mesh and click on the increase thickness icon to be found on the surface modeling tab; paying special notice to ensure that the number of points are reduced to 4. Fig 15.
In conclusion, whilst on the surface all appears well, all is not as it seems; for in my experience a mesh created with the coons tool does seem to have a bit of a flaw. In as much as the mesh consists of “independent clusters or irregular islands” of verts’ and nothing to date has given me any success in welding them into a whole. (Snapping; Welding; target welding or average welding)
If anybody can suggest how to get round this problem, I’m all ears. So the result is on the wing of a prayer that the clusters do not get dislodged, ok on static rendering but dubious I would have thought if required to be part of an animation or a rigged pose.
Some interesting results occur if one gets too carried away with the level of smoothing. . Fig 17.
Interesting effect, Red - thanks for the explanation:)
Same thing happens when you extract a curve from a primitive sphere, for instance. It’ll show as one curve, but when thickness is added and smoothed, it shows that it’s not all connected. Won’t be a problem animating, as long as it’s all welded as one object.
Really, never noticed that I always tend to use either of the curve tools. But the coons is a bit of a nightmare. I’ve tried all forms of welding both prior to bending; after bending but prior to copying & pasting and, after pasting.
Always the same result. What really becomes a pain is applying a shading domain to this structure, since there’s a gerzillion forms; maybe it will be easier on my other computer with more of everything; I’ll find out later.
If you are only applying one shader domain, you could weld (not point weld) all the gazillion bits and bobs into a single object, select the lot and do it in one fell swoop:)
Aah, yes, I see - sorry, I thought you meant point welding wouldn’t work. Maybe the gazilion is a couple million too many for Hex to handle in one bite? Have you tried doing it say, 10 at a time?
In a group ! Well, that they are. Hmm, I’ll ungroup them to the root and see if I have better luck that way.
I have a vague memory that I have tried that, but I can’t be positive. So after I’ve tackled my suspected dust bunnies hiding in the farthest regions of my mother board, I shall give it a whirl and see if that solves my problem. Thanks Roygee.
No good, had to try it and it sort of worked; first time I tried with the whole lot, mini beast crashed through running out of Window handles.
So rebooted, selected ten did a normal weld and bish bosh. All welded, a little bi-product however, the rest disappeared.
So, will dup this file. Delete everything in it excepting this, try to average weld and if successful copy & paste it back into the original. Fingers crossed.
Yay! You were right roygee. Un-grouped and progressively average welded until I ended up with one;
Saved it. Loaded up the original file, deleted the gazillions and imported the revised object. The only thing which I found a tad strange following this I lost 90% of my shading domains on the “model”, However, I found I still had the shading domains & the accompanying materials listed. Odd! All rectified now.
