Loft error

[DaveMBarb]

I've been trying to create a cornice outside of a building, but the loft just wont cooperate. Here's an image that shows the path, shape, and resulting loft, and for some reason, the loft won't extend to the end of the path line. I could just edit it in subobject mode, but the more corners that are in the shape, the more distorted the loft is because segments get shorter than they should, making the resulting shape miss the edge of the wall entirely.

 

Any ideas as to whats happening? What am I doing wrong? Thanks in advance...

 

http://img181.imageshack.us/my.php?image=lofterrorcb7.jpg

 

Edit: Forgot to mention I'm using Max 9-32 bit.

[ishpalsingh]

select the vertex and change them to corner

[Koper]

use the 'sweep modifier (rather than 'loft), much cleaner and easy to modify. select the path apply the sweep and then pick the shape.

 

 

 

 

check the vertext order of your shape and if all them are welded, also try andr reverse the spline, just right click on it and select the top most option

 

 

but use the sweep, its probably on of the best tools in max, hehe;)

[DaveMBarb]

Thanks for the help, I managed to figure out what I'd been doing wrong, the pivot point of my shape was in the middle of the shape and not along the back, so it wasn't lofting along the back of the cornice, meaning that it wasn't rounding corners correctly. (wow what a run on sentence)

 

All of the vertexes were set for corner and properly welded. I had messed with different vertex orders before hand as well.

 

As to the sweep modifier, pretty cool, I'd never used it before. My main questions about it is: is there a way to auto-optimize the sweep (as you can with a loft, defining both path and shape steps) in order to reduce the number of faces in the model? Will sweeps react to changes made in an xref'ed file? It seems like a handy tool for sure.

 

Thanks again!

[Koper]

I can't see why it should not be able to work through an Xref, as long as you dont colaps the modifier stack.

 

you can delete the profile and then if you want to edit the profile on a later stage just go to where you picked the profile and select 'extract'.

 

make sure you instance the extraction, if you forget you can always just re-pick the profile.

 

as for editing the path, go back down the modifier and edit the spline.

 

to find out if it works forsure with xrefs, just try it and then please post your findigs

 

I think you'll see that you'll use the loft less and less

cool