small triumph-boole

[Ernest Burden III]

I have this coffered, vaulted ceiling that seen in section is an ellipse. I modeled this in CAD, and having made the long axis and short axis profiles seperately, wanted to combine them with a boolean add so the polys would be cut to eachother for better rendering. My CAD program cannot do that, so I sent the layers to FormZ. But FZ would never let me boolean them, saying they were the wrong type of data, even though they were created and imported the same way. Why? I don't know. Next to Rhino. No go, I couldn't see a way for it to see my closed-surface polygon meshes as solids to ADD. Darn.

 

Let's try Cinema. A quick visit to my overweight friend, Mr. Manual, and the boolean modifier and my cut was made with minimal cleanup back in CAD.

 

The downside: I would not have had to cut the polys except so they would render well in Lightscape (shadow leaks). I tried to use Cinema but it seemed overwhelmed by the model, which seems odd. Lightscape spins it around like nothing, C4D couldn't even import the whole file, it said I ran out of memory (1.5G RAM) and didn't load the whole file. My first try at the boole failed in C4D for the same reason, so I cut out one section and only imported that to boole, then copied across in CAD to re-create the whole ceiling.

 

Still, it was nice to see how well Cinema did the boolean once I gave it what it wanted.

 

This is the ceiling, a WIP from LS

[Manuel Rivera]

Ernest,

The model is quite beautiful, and supurbly rendered! I just wonder if this same image could be acomplished with procedural texturing ie. diffuse, and bump, and I'm asking not critiquing? Also could you talk about your npr process alittle, the grain effect is very successful.

Thnaks,

Manny

[anvaraziz]

wow nice,,,

 

i like the ceeling very much....but the Pendent lights from the ceeling looks like flying, any its a nice img....

 

is the ceeling bump map or displacement?

 

any way good...................

[STRAT]

looks good EB. i just been using C4D's boolean function as we speak. much more effective than max ever did.

 

Ernest,

The model is quite beautiful, and supurbly rendered! I just wonder if this same image could be acomplished with procedural texturing ie. diffuse, and bump, and I'm asking not critiquing? .

Thnaks,

Manny

 

which parts of the rendering do you think might be able to be substituated with proceedural mapping out of interest, and how?

 

wow nice,,,

 

is the ceeling bump map or displacement?

 

any way good...................

 

as he sayid, it's modelled. besides, look at the depth of it, bump mapping and displacement mapping cant to it to this effect.

[Ernest Burden III]

as he sayid, it's modelled. besides, look at the depth of it, bump mapping and displacement mapping cant to it to this effect.

 

I'm coming to understand that displacement mapping CAN create a ceiling like that. You would only need the topmost plane with a proper UV map and a 'heightfield' sort of map. But for Cinema to do this in the current version you would apparently need a REALLY dense polygon mesh, since C lacks sub-poly displacement. It may get it next version. I have learned about this reading the Zbrush/C4D threads on cgtalk.com It is a very interesting way to approace complex geometry that really derives from fairly simple shapes--like this ceiling.

 

So yes, its just a model. The point of the post was that Cinema did what I couldn't seem to do in either FormZ or Rhino from the same input DXF file. Bravo C!

 

The NPR parts are covered in many other threads I have started, so try reading them, as there isn't anything new with this image.

[alanmac]

Hi Ernest

 

Great bit of work as usual.

 

I was working on something this weekend in Vectorworks and Artlantis and the file was taking a long time to export, and seemed a problem for the renderer. Some time ago I'd made a chair in Vectorworks, created it into a symbol. I had edited this and caused the chair to have an extra seat pad rising at a strange angle out of the original seat pad !! It's a 2d/3d symbol. Once I'd gone back and fixed the symbol, export was much quicker.

 

As there are around 120 of these in the drawing I see why the thing got snagged up.

 

My point is maybe why your file kicked out was because of a bad bit of information causing the program to work much harder than it needed to.

 

Keep up the good work.

 

Kind regards

 

Alan

[IC]

I would've tackled that with bump maps(cos I'm lazy)

It wouldn't have looked half as good though.

 

Another nice render Ernest.

[Ernest Burden III]

Another nice render Ernest.

 

Thanks, though it isn't done yet.

 

I hope to get smoother shadow boundries, like around the sconces and at the cove light. Since this was done in LS you can see some of the telltale meshing artifacts.

 

I would love to be able to use a Cinema stochastic. But it choked on the polycount. That doesn't make sense, many people use C4D for complex scenes (non-architectural) that must have much higher poly counts than this file. Lightscape handles it without any problems. By the way, how do you get a polycount in Cinema? Of course, Cinema doesn't need such neat geometry to do a nice render, so I could have stayed with original non-booleaned version.

[STRAT]

right click on an object in the object stack, then choose either scene info or object info.

 

but becareful, that poly figure is in quads.

[Manuel Rivera]

which parts of the rendering do you think might be able to be substituated with proceedural mapping out of interest, and how?

 

I think eb said it when he said that the displacement could do it. Another way would be to finely detail a map of the desired ceiling and use the heightfield by bitmap command in rhino. But all that is gained is the majority of the work goes into developing a map that produces a model, as opposed to modeling it the way eb already has. So its a wash i guess.

[Ernest Burden III]

Another way would be to finely detail a map of the desired ceiling and use the heightfield by bitmap command in rhino.

 

Just because Rhino has that command does not mean it works. I've tried it, many times. The one in Bryce actually works much better, the one in Rhino just sets the PC into a slow depletion of memory until finally Rhino crashes. Even when it does work the results are not usable. Besides, a ceiling like this would need to be based on a UV'ed surface, since it's not flat, and the projections must go perpendicular to the local surface.

[leed]

Ernest lovely image.

The ceiling is really nice.

Do you use form Z to model at all?

I know Z throws up a lot of errors with the wrong type of object, did you import with "make solids" switched on.

It is a bit irrelevant now though seeing as you have such a nice image.

 

Lee

[Ernest Burden III]

Do you use form Z to model at all?

I know Z throws up a lot of errors with the wrong type of object, did you import with "make solids" switched on.

 

I do about 1% or less modeling in FZ, but hope to increase that as I get comfortable with it (if I get comfortable). Yes, I had the solids thing checked, I tried it several way. The imported stuff was correctly turned into a single object, it just would never do the 'add' (duplicate points or surfaces, it said), I tried using another box object to subtract one from and then the other so I could use the polygons (just reverse all normals), no go either--wrong entity types. I don't know, it just didn't work in FZ or Rhino but did in Cinema, same data as input.

[leed]

Ernest

Form Z is a very good, accurate modeller, steep learning curve but worth it.

It does try to create true solids, and that is where bad geometry ( as form Z tec support would say ) stops the creation of a true solid.

The form of the roof would be relatively easy to produce in Z with out having to bool anything.

I have started working with polygons as opposed to solids, using the trim split command, then creating a thickness if needed.

 

Cinema just does not care about true solid forms which is good and if it gets the job done who's complaining.

 

Lee

[Frosty]

Ernest, if you have any questions about FormZ, gimme a shout. I've been teaching it for 4 yrs.

[Ernest Burden III]

Ernest, if you have any questions about FormZ, gimme a shout. I've been teaching it for 4 yrs.

 

Why is it unable to handle a real-time display (in OpenGL) of a model that spins perfectly in Lightscape?

 

FZ tech just says "your model is too complex", and for those long file imports "just leave it running overnight" for a file that opens in seconds in Lightscape.

 

The announcement for 4.5 suggests improvements in OpenGL display, so I hope to see it perform better.

 

Mostly, I am not used to the odd workflow of FZ. Cinema's weird for me as well, and Rhino is really great, it just doesn't do much with polygons.

[Frosty]

I cant answer the OGL problem, I've never really used it. I actually model in wire.

 

What kind of file imports are taking you so long? I frequently import DXFs and DWGs from ACAD clients. They can take a bit if they are sloppy files, but no more than 20mins. I can work on something else while that runs and I save them as FMZ once that is done. I do agree with you, certain imoprts and exports are VERY slow and large (OBJ comes to mind).

 

In regards to the work flow, I'm sure that you understand the green tool modifiers and grey tools and how they work together (Cinema is very similar in this respect). Green modifiers allow the grey tools to accomplish more than one task. Because of this paradigm, FormZ has hundreds of tool combinations. I'm not sure if this is unique to FormZ, but I do know that this is usually the most difficult aspect for students to comprehend.

 

Thinking back to your boolean issues. Here are a couple guidlines for FormZ. Facetted objects work better than smoothed. Concave or convex faces cannot be used in a boolean - these must be triangulated. Faces which are perfectly aligned can cause a difficulty with difference operations. Try to have the cutting objects project through the object being cut. When using multiple objects to to do "array" booleans (ie. windows on a fascade), select all of the cutting objects and use the join command first. This will allow a single boolean to be used to cut all holes simultainiously.