Intersecting archway woes: modeling for realtime

nicedwar

I'm trying to make a clean pair of intersecting archways. I'm starting with the canopy. I was hoping to have the archways meet cleanly rather than clip through each other for texturing purposes. I've tried several techniques, which all pretty much boil down to trying to boolean together two perpendicular half-pipes. Any ideas? This is my first attempt, which looks awful when rendered:

Slum

Hmm.. From your description it's kind of hard to tell what you're trying to do. Do you have a piece of concept you're working from?

Asherr

why don't you model each section seperately? break it down into the 4 arch sections and then each arch section can be modeled as a half. then you can copy/clone the piece around to get the full set.

Neox

well if you're using max you could model one eighth and use symmetry to get all parts together

nicedwar

I'm unfamiliar with laying extra loops, cutting and stitching... I'm using 3ds Max. I haven't tried symmetry yet... I've never done more than 2 pieces for that. I'll give these ideas a shot later today.

rooster

i don't see why you're getting the funky render, almost looks more like your render settings than the model? what material you got on there?

nicedwar

It's the default material in UnrealEd. I'm pretty sure it's the model that is looking bad, since it was showing signs of bad polygon placement before, and still is subtly in Max. Apparently what I'm trying to make is a groin vault:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groin_vault#Comparison_with_other_vault_designs

Rhinokey

quickest way i know to make one of those,, made it in a total of 10 secs.


cutting out most of those cross section lines will make it shade better, you really don't need any for the shape.

nicedwar

Bah. I was trying to rotate mirror... wasn't working... will try it again... I knew there had to be an easy way. A friend of mine and I both found some ways to model each section and piece them together. Thanks for everyone's help.

Rhinokey

make sure you select the mirror in the stack dropdown.

nicedwar

I think I got it for the most part. Rotating the mirror is a touchy process. For some reason, half the time I mess with it, the mirrored piece just gets stretched around itself. Scaling the initial object at all distorts the mirrored piece when rotating as well.

Sage

Try turning off the slice along mirror option and see if that helps next time you use symmetry.

Alex

Saidin311

It looks like you don't have your angle snaps on. I would suggest turning them on at least for rotating the mirror, that way it will always be 90 (or 180) degrees. The angle snap button is the red magnet with the arc on it. You might have already done that, but its just something I noticed.

nicedwar

Good tips guys, thanks. I'll put them to use next attempt.

Rhinokey

if the object starts scaling and skewing when you rotate the mirror, try reseting the x-forms

Rhinokey

also a lot of your weird shading in enien is most likely caused by those 5 sided polies created when your cross section edges join. get rid of all the cross sections there,

nicedwar

I did mess with the X-form a little. I don't quite understand what it is. I think I got rid of most of the weird interstecting polys too.

Rhinokey

xform gets rid of all the bad corrupt junk in the mesh.

Mark Dygert

Short answer:
It fixes stuff... sometimes.

Long answer:

Reset XForm = Reset Transform data
There is a bunch data you'll never see that is stored in your mesh. Info like the location of the pivot point, the orientation of the object in relation to its bounding box, what angle the bonding box is in relation to the scene (world space). When you Reset XForm it clears that data, orients the pivot point to match the world space, and often clears up all those weird scaling, sizing and misc issues you get with some meshes that have been heavily tweaked.

Technically its not dorking out when it stretches like that. Its as designed. At some point you used the "select and scale uniform" tool on your object. When you use that tool to scale the object it distorts the bounding box for that object. So if you scale an object twice its original width, when you rotate the slice tool the orange slice gizmo will scale twice as wide to match. Reset XForm resets the scaling data and tells max this object is no longer 2x as wide as it is tall, it is now naturalized.

Reset XForm and Linked XForm are also used in animation, but in the industry its the magical fix all button.