Digital Art Zone

I’ve been working on creating a chain link or such.  I’ve used Multiple Copies and welded them together after I was done (all the new pieces of the group were selected when I used the weld).  When I go back with say soft select, etc.  the new chain isn’t acting like a solid object.  If I grab one of the links, it will act as if that link isn’t part of the solid object.

I know it’s probably something simple, but for the life of me I can’t figure it out.

When you made a link, it was an object. making,say, 10 copies/clones of it made 11 objects. Welding them all together merged them all into a single object.

However, they are still separate pieces. To make soft selection work, you would need to weld their points together.

I know this may be difficult or impossible to do on a structure like a chain, but it’s the nature of the beast, unfortunately.

Thanks for the info, Afea.

depending on what you are using the chain-link model for, an easier option may be to have a plane and then texture it with a chainlink texture where the metal is the only part that is not transparent. you can still use displacements and normal maps to give it the illusion of depth and with the transparency it would look very good.

So you’re creating a chain of separate objects, then you’re welding using… which weld?

Is this the sort of thing you mean?

I made a few links, and then selected them all, and hit the weld icon and I got a single object, with soft selection, I still get a single object:-

Sweetleaf - 18 October 2012 01:19 AM

I made a few links, and then selected them all, and hit the weld icon and I got a single object, with soft selection, I still get a single object

I think you’re misunderstanding the problem.

Your chain is made of 4 separate links even though it’s welded as one object.

Here’s what I mean:

Select a point on your rightmost link in the image.
Hit your “+” key to “grow” your selection.
Keep hitting the “+” key and you’ll see that you’ll never be able to “grow” your selection beyond that link.
Likewise with “soft selection”. You won’t be able to add weighted selection beyound that link.

In order to select edges/points along the entire object, each pair of links must have at least 1 point welded in common. In order to select faces along the entire object, each pair of links must have at least 1 edge in common.

Absolutely correct - more to the point, why would you want to do a soft select on a series of links?  What are you wanting to achieve?  With a bit more info on this, we could possibly give you a method of getting it done:)

If you just want to bend the chain you’re better off to use the Bender tool. Faster and easier.