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Untriangulate hadn't occured to me but if it don't get them all that's too much work... will have to remember to save before doleing out names. The save as diff name for file with names. I'll just tell the model that we ran out of name tags on the last project. :)
John,.
Try this,.
Select your model,. Go to select by / name / Polygons,. or polymesh,. Select a named area,.
in the name area,. clear / delete the name so that it's blank.
hit ok
Now if you go to select by / Name,. you should be clear of any name.
If you select the entire mesh,. you can select either, named Polymesh,. or named selections,. clear the existing name,. hit ok,. and it's back to an unnamed mesh with no named selections.
Edited because my rant about "Why name things in the first place if its going to be such a dilema later?" seemed more and more pointless as I wrote! LOL
Sorry wgd.... here's an image to fill the void!
Oh gosh... I just tried it and it works great... Once it's blank it looses the function to choose anything. It always be there but I'll be able to select new areas/polygons and rename those as I wish... Cool!
I had tried this before for only 1 of 3 named selections simply to see if Carrara would except a Blanked out name. I was hoping that it would remove the selection allttogether. I don't think I'd tested it to see if it still selected anything.
Thanks for the *very* good image. Looked everywhere and the void is nowhere to be found. :)
"Removing Named Polygons" - *Solved*!
When 3DAGE speaks... Listen... Carefully and Pay Attention... Consider yourself lucky to benefit from his words of wisdom and experience. The same is true for PhilW, Dartanbeck, TangoAlpha... geez the list is huge... so always "listen carefully and pay attention" when anyone speaks.
John's Crazy Objects: A Simple Gravemarker
I used TangoAlpha's method for creating a door earlier in this thread, instructions/settings are HERE, to model the gravemarker. I've submitted this as my small part of Animators Club for Carrara thread . Lets create a simple animation every week. Week 1 Angry Skeleton by mmoir. The files for the gravemarker object and the final texture map can be found there. When a grave marker was wanted many designs came to mind but I had the one in the pic below in mind. It wouldn't be hard to expand upon the object's design if a cross for the top or a base for the marker is desired.
I thank mmoir for the very helpful example, fantastic, instuctions on how to apply a texture map. Those can also be found on the Animator Club link above. Don't forget that mmoir has a very good modeling tutorial available here at DAZ3D... Carrara Modeling Tutorials.
Finally had time to dig out the training vids. . . Back when I first bought and watched them, I didn't have ERC so I just skipped it and forgot about it. Made a working airplane in no time at all. Next up will be clothing, something that I have touched on once or twice with help from the board, but the vids have the conforming step (I never use Daz so that should be interesting).
I very rarely use Daz Studio myself and usually for very specific functions - but getting conforming clothing is defintely one of those!
I think it's also worth adding ,..
Since we now have VirtualWorld Dynamics "cloth and hair" as a dynamic cloth plugin.
we have the ability to model clothing in carrara on the figure and simulate.
Conforming clothing is still very useful and uses less resources,. and DS makes the process of creating conforming clothing from your own models, really easy.
Alert to All: Seems that the the DAZ3D site inculding the Forums are experiency problems. See Missing renders in gallery which kinda explains why many images do not appear.. including nearly all but the latest ones of mine and many others. Some images are shown while others are not. Note if you see the tiny version for an image you will most likely get a 404 image/page not found error.
I've made Help/Support aware that I'm not impressed by this since it's still going on.
[edit 10/13/16]
Back to Normal: Things appear to be back to normal... last night and today. Great all the pics seem to be back Cool! If you still experience/find any problems report to Site down and malfunctioning or open a request for the problem so it/they get fixed.
Modeling Jewelry - A question and partial/possible answer to myself.
Last night I attempted to create a spiked/star shaped flat, 32 point, circle in Vertex modeler... I know that I approached it wrong... I first emptied the polygon.... then selected every other point and scaled them smaller to create a spiky look. Cool "I think to myself... I can use this for all sorts of things"... well turn out not for what I wanted as is... I'd planed to select the tips of each outer spike and using rotate make an earring with a swirled look. I notice right away the error of my ways... there was no inner geometry.... knowing what it would do I didn't even try to rotate since I know what would happen. I then created an other flat circle, 16 points this time and smaller for a hole I wanted in the middle... trying to link it's points to those of the scaled down points of the spiky shape would not work at all so I tabled that Idea.
Playing around, knowing that wouldn't work I decide to try extruding it to give it some thickness. Cool but still not what I wanted. So here I sit the day after. I'm now thinking about using dynamic extrusion but not for thickness but towards it's center in tiny steps which would give me the geometry needed and the hole in the center. I can then extrude it for thickness or even try "add thickness". Then with soft select on choose the points that I want and scale/twist them. Still a bit confused as to how I'll get the spiky look but all will become clear if I mess around long enough.
If I'm understand correctly, start with a filled circle, let's say 16 points. Use dynamic extrusion inwards with Shift selected so it does it in the same plane, and delete the inner polygon - you now have a ring shape. Use point mode to select every other outer point and then scale - as the points are evenly distributed, their centre point will be the middle of the shape and so they will uniformly make your eight pointed star shape, with a hole in the middle. My example is stupidly large but the principle still applies. You can then select rotate and get something that looks like those Ninja throwing stars.
That is very similar to what I'm planning on doing. !! --- Done but not quite what I want... see pics. What I'm aiming for are arms of the starburst shape that I can rotate and have a smooth, sorta organic look... imagine an octupus arm that is slowly curved... even curling beyond that where the most outer part curls backwards like a hook. I'm thinking I'll need to tessalate or subdivide in order to be able to use soft select of each or all of the outer polys so I can get what I want. For curling backwards I'll have to turn down soft select and use a combination of scaling and rotating.
I deviated from your instructions only by first emptying the polygon which gave me an empty hole in the center... tomato...tomaato. :) Hmm... after rotating the lines of the polys overlay other lines... wonder if DS or a 3D app will be able to handle them like that... hmm.
Included are 3 more pics I got from google of starfish images which represent close to what I'm aiming for.
I think there's a good chance that you will get render artifacts with the edges crossing over each other like that because you have multiple faces taking up the same space.
It looks like you have some weird duplicated edges too - hard to tell exactly what is going on there. Try grabbing a couple of those vertices and moving them so the lines are not overlapping and see if it messes up the shape you are going for. I started trying to draw on your screenshot of the rotated star shape but there is just so much overlap I couldn't even tell what should get moved to where to fix the overlaps.
MDO, I was thinking that the overlapped edges would create havok. I've not messed with it any further... it is saved in case I want to mess with cleaning it up. I've no idea how the edges got duplicate but I suspect that it is the extreme amount I'd rotated it.
Hi wgdjohn, I think you are right in that you need more geometry to get those sprials without any nasty overlaps. Not sure if this is what you are after, but anyway, here is what I did, with help from previous instructions and suggestions:
Using the Oval tool, I created a circle. Mine only has 16 points because I got tired of my trial and error methods and having to select all the points.
Then, Extruded as per Phil's suggestion, I Extruded inward holdng down Shift, then deleted the inner circle. I then selected every other point and Scaled larger, creating the basic "star" shape.
Next, I used the Add tool (the icon is a '+' sign in the Tool Bar) and added points to the spikes of the stars at the 1/2 mark - when the mouse is hovering over an edge it will read "1/2" (or "1/3" or "1/4" depending where the curser is, so be careful), then click and voila a point will appear, dividing that edge. Okay, so I went around cutting up the spikes, but using that tool made an inconvenient 'V' shape. So after adding all my points, I went back and selected the apex of those 'V's' and scaled them up to make a more or less straight line. Then, I selected all those edges and used the Extract Along tool and that created two more edges on both sides of my selection. Lastly I started from the outside and selected the outer points and rotated them slightly, then used the '+' tool for Selections (right side of the interface in the vertex room under "Selection Tools"), rotated a bit more, added again to the selection, rotated, and one more time, added to the selection and rotated.
And after all that, still not sure if that's what you are after, but anyway, that is one method. I tried some Boolean operations to make a cookie cutter using a cylinder but it made a big mess of triangles and crap, so, I had to do it the hard way. Hopefully someone has an easier method.
Also added one level of smoothing. The geometry is still a bit wonky though...
I know that's a lot of words, so I included some pictures.
Desert you're the Dude of the day! Thanks...That is very close to where I wanted to start out... it's exactly what I was attempting last night. I'm not even certain what exact design I want in the end... may make a few different ones... very similar to your excellent instructions and final pic but also at least one that curls around even more forming a rounded edge... something like the way the last image I show but not as extreme. I'm also thinking about making quads for tiny but blunt ends. Cool! Thanks again.
Once you have your basic shape, you can add thickness and then scale down the ends with soft selection in order to taper the tentacles, I would then be tempted to add chains of bones to the whole structure so that you can deform the arms however you want with the bones. You may need to add some subdivision and/or smoothing to give enough geometry to deform smoothly.
Another way to do an organic shape like this would be to start with say an octagon (for eight arms), add thickness, and then extrude the side faces a few times with scaling down for each one to give the tapered effect (effectively box modelling it). Make sure in this case that the polygons are not linked so that they extrude separately - you can do all the arms at once like that (see attachment for a quick and dirty example with one level of smoothing applied. I also indented the middle rather than cutting right through).
Phil, Thanks... I'd not thought about bones but sounds good to me... Haven't played around with dem bones yet so it would be a good time for a new learning experiece too. Gonna have to try out the octagon/box modeling method also... a very interesting approach that makes sense. Thanks for all the great advice.
See, I knew someone would provide a more elegant solution.
Nice method Phil!
Well, my next solution builds on that idea, but still degraded back into brute force.
I created a box with about twenty segements, centered it, then went to Deform>Taper. Next, I selected about 8 segments and went to Deform>Bend and Twist and used a Bend Angle of 270 degrees to make that "hook". Next, I selected the whole object and went ot Edit>Replicate, and selcted the Circle option, 8 copies and checked the Rotate box. Oh, and I rotated the original object so it was aligned with the 'X' axis because of trial and error with the Replicate command. Maybe I was doing something wrong, but I found this way made a nice circular array.
Next, went and created my central disc/hub. I inserted an Oval with 8 sides, extruded once to create the hole, then deleted it, and added thickness as per Phil's suggestion. I eyeballed the thickness to be about the same as the base of each arm. I then maneuvered each arm to line up with the eight sides of the central hub, leaving a bit of space inbetween, and then went around and selected the base polygon of an arm, its matching face of the hub and used the Bridge tool to connect. I repeated for all arms. See, I told you it was brute forced.
You could also create a nice curvy polyline to your satisfaction and insert a flat plane and use the Path Sweep tool to create your initial arm. Tapering it could get cumbersome though. Just some more thoughts.
Ok, the polyline and Path Sweep wasn't so bad. For tapering, I selected the whole object, deslected the first segment, then started scaling down, hitting the "-" sign under Selection Tools in the righthand panel after each scale down. All eyeballed, so, not linearly perfect. I then did what I outlined above, replicated in a circle and used the Bridge tool to connect all the arms. I had to rotate the original arm a few times to get my copies to replicate the way I wanted. Screen grab for clarity shows my polyline and original arm (rotated for proper replication).
Cool. That would make an interesting decorative element on some furniture or something. :)
Fantastic! Very creative. While reading your previous post Path Sweep came to mind... I've wondered in the past if there was some way to have a mesh taper as the path was swept but haven't stumbled upon a way to do that.. instead I drop in a disk/circle.. make dupes and scale them down. What you have done looks even easier. Replicator is great... design one and let it make all the copies... I started using it in Carrara 5 or 6 Pro to make a pumpkin... required a lot of cleanup the way I used it. I can imagine your object being used as part of a lamp, as MDO said part of furniture, a lamp, as a keyholder or cupholder just twist the end and angle down a bit... kewl.
Never imagined my crazy questions to spark so many answers by so many well known incredible modelers and PA's... much better than myself. I'm grateful to you all.
Modeling in Carrara is funnnnn!
I wondered as well tackling your question and with Carrara I always hesitate to say "no".
Can Hexagon do this?
I only had it installed once and barely touched it, afraid of all the negative rumors of Mac crashes.
Yes there is! There are so many different ways to do what you want, but can I direct you to the Double Sweep tool. You need to use the Polyline tool to create a closed cross section and then two open polylines which define the outer edges of your shape. Select the Double Sweep tool, and then first select your cross-section and then the two "guides" and there is your shape. By having the "guides" come together, you can create a tapered shape (see images).
Here is another example with more organic guides lines using the Interpolated Curve tool to draw the lines.
...and a quick version of creating a range of tentacle shapes (basically from the same shapes, just rotating the cross-section), with a more sculpted flatter underside and added shading domain for that with replicated suckers. (Real octopuses have more ordered rows of suckers, but hey, this looks quite cool for a few minutes work!). Just build a body and attach the arms for a complete animal.
Wow! This is what happens when a Carrara user doesn't use all the tools and gets more or less satisfied with the ones they know best. The manual explains Double Sweep but only shows one example which didn't impress me. Just proves that one should always experiment with each tool take them to new levels of what you imagine. As in life one learns to crawl first. I'm still learning how to walk and fall too often. Phil Wilkes knows how to walk circles around everyone. :)
In the pic I've shown is my 3rd attempt to recreate what PhilW shows... even my 3 attempts only took minutes till I got something vaguely similar to his example. I also scaled my base oval to be narrower than it's its width... still needs work on each path as you can see a bit of a problem near its pointed end... fixable though. I've included a pic which highlights where Double Sweep is.
Carrara Rocks! - Never hesitate to experiment!
Phil, Thank you so much. You've inspired a need for another another of your very helpful Tutorials. "Carrara Tips and Tricks" or "Carrara - Steps Beyond" or something to that effect. I know you're working on another tutorial at the moment... can't wait. :)
DesertDude, While I have Hexagon I've only tried it a few times so have no idea of what it is capable of... never took the time to learn it properly... even have a never viewed tutorial... Carrara is too much fun and is where I spend all my modeling, terrain creating, posing, scene setup, animation etc time at this time. Guess I should play with it and Blender which I've never bothered with yet.
All... Be sure to check out the links on Page One here for links to PhilW's and mmoir's Carrara Tutorials, those are "Must Haves", and the YouTube links to videos.
I've been trying to redirect new Carrara users here as well as pointing them to links, those mentioned above, and other link's to help them get started. Don't be surprised when a horde of questions from new Carrara folks start showing up. :)
Updated the links page today... Added First Steps - Setting up a sample scene in Carrara with plant, terrain, sky and hair by diomede - Setting up a scene in Carrara as well as making objects, using Shaders and 3DPaint.
Unbelievable! I never cease to be astonished at Carrara's capabilities, and more so the dedicated members of the community who reveal Carrara's secrets. Just like wgdjohn above I helplessly took a look at the Double Sweep tool in the manual, and I was also unimpressed by the example, or just plain didn't understand the potential (...more the later...). Thanks Phil, incredible possibilities!
Half the battle is just knowing what is there, hidden away for when you might need it. There are certainly some powerful modelling tools in Carrara!