Crown Moulding or Window/Door Trim / Baseboards

[smorales]

Hello All,

 

 

First thanks to CGA to allow me to join:

 

Is there any suggestions on creating moulding for rendering. I have found many 3ds files from moulding models that are in 3d, but when I extrude or loft; they became to face intensive so the rendering was awfully slow. Is there another way or am I stuck. I live in Boston and people here want the old colonial look in their homes.

 

Thanks Sage

[BrianKitts]

I always redraw any profiles I get from an outside source. That way they are clean and you can control the number of vertices resulting in a cleaner sweep/loft.

 

Balance the amount of detail in your profile with the distance from which it will be viewed, thus making sure if you can't view the detail don't bother putting it in.

[Mechadus]

I generally use splines with either the Sweep modifier, or the Loft object type to do my mouldings. I agree that retracing everything is a good idea also. Nearly every single time Ive tried to use non-max geometry either the poly count goes thru the roof, or I wind up with some random error that leaves me wishing I had just rebuilt everything using MAXs tools.

 

-Nick

[RAYMOND]

Probablty not...

 

But are you linking in your model using ADT

it is quite easy using profiles to do this

or sweeps to modify conponents.

I have done some very complicated trims with this

 

if you are just in max... don't know

 

R:confused:

[Guest nazcaLine]

the redrawing in max of the profile and path used for the moulding is a very good idea, but remember to play with the number of steps in the "interpolation" rollout of the splines, it is 6 by default, try with less or more depending of the level of detail you want.

i've done mouldings with even 2 of interpolation steps, since it was a little far from the camera, and the polycount was minimal.

good luck

 

Eduardo

[FlyinHawaiian]

When I first started out in ArchVis, I used to superstitiously retrace nearly every line from Cad that I needed to use for building sites, lofts, etc, etc. I've found that if you create a new object in the same direction as the original imported line, etc, (IE: if the line is flat on the Z axis, draw it from the top view, flat on the X, draw from the corresponding iso head-on view, if angled in world space then give the shape a uvw and using autogrid, create off of that surface) and attach the imported object to the newly created line, the imported line will inherit the new properties of the object you attached it to. Then, I simply sub-object delete the newly created geometry and center the pivot to the newly clean line.

[jai-ch]

can any one suggest how to save dwg to 3ds 2008 format

[Conor Clancy]

Jai Ch,

Max will import a DWG file no problem from the File/import button.

[SandmanNinja]

There are some tutorials here, giving you some tips and tricks on importing Autocad files into 3DS. The 26-week series of tutorials - well worth downloading the entire series. They're great and free!