Welding Objects Tut

 

by mattam (#truespace)

To keep this tutorial simple, I will show you how to weld together 2 cubes

and then melt them in order to create a smoothed object.

First make two cubes, move them apart, then make a smaller cube, and make a "pipe" between

the two bigger cubes.

fig 1. wireframe view

fig 2. shaded view

Then boolean union the 3 cubes together.

It should then look like this :

fig 3. Boolean unioned

Now the cubes are unioned, but if you attempt to ThermoClay melt it , the floating faces will mess it up

fig 4. Messed Smooth

the smooth object is not continuous, and has 3 chunks. This is due to the floating faces

fig 5. floating faces diagram

The yellow faces are not connected to the green faces, thus they are "floating".

In order to remedy the problem, we need to connect them up.

The quick way of doing this (courtesy of Casey on #truespace)

is to just press the nurb button which will create a nurb object.

You then need to right click on the nurb button, and click on "destroy NURBS object"

When the Alert box pops up, select "No" in order to extract the control mesh.

fig 6. extracted control mesh

The faces are all now connected, and are not floating anymore.

When you Thermoclay this, it will now look fine.

fig 7. smoothed mesh

Then to make the seam in between the cubes go away, select the 4 polys

of the connecting "pipe" by clicking on the Point edit icon

and clicking on each face (you might have to rotate around the object to get all of them.

fig8. select the "pipe"

After all 4 faces have been selected, click on the point scale tool

and then scale the polygons so the the seam is not obvious

(you might have to change to a couple of different viewports in order to get it the right shape)

fig 9. enlarge pipe

Now when you melt it, the seam will not even seem to be there ;p

fig 10. Smooth object

 

In ThermoClay3 there is a button that calls the Nurb routine,

and fixes the floating faces automatically so you don't have to

go through the longer process.

This is only the beginning of a whole bunch of opportunities that await you when you

start to explore the power of ThermoClay and hypersweeping.

Here's a picture that was done in ThC3 recently making extensive use of a similar welding technique described above

and the incredible power of ThermoClay3.

I hope you have fun with ThermoClay, and if you have a chance, drop by #truespace on IRC Galaxynet and say hi!