Making dice

[T.Fentie]

I have follow the tut on the web site for making a die. In moduler it looks fine but when i send it to layout the dots are sticking out of the dice, insted of being concaved. Can anyone help please?

[richpr]

Not familiar with that tut, but it could be the balls you had in a second layer to boolean from the die... If so, delete that extra layer...

[SkipG]

For my first project, I tried following the die tutorial with LW 9.2, and ran into the following problem: I created a sphere for the dots, assigned it a color (black), copied it, then placed copies on the faces and intersected the spheres with the box on layer 1. In wireframe, everything looks fantastic. However, when viewed as a solid, the dots were invisible!

Upon reflection, I realized that the spheres were being colored on the "outside", while the inside surface was colored the same as the faces of the die. How would I go about coloring the inside surface of the spheres? If I could reverse the direction of the normal vectors, would that solve the problem?

Thanks,
Skip

[tribbles]

While inverting the spheres would make the inside coloured, it seems like it's what richpr said:

Like richpr, I haven't seen the tut, but I would imagine the basic sequence would have been:

1) Make a cube in layer 1

2) Create the 'dots' using spheres in layer 2; colour as appropriate

3) Make layer 1 foreground and layer 2 background

4) Boolean subtract the dots from the cube

Since the spheres still exist in layer 2, they'll be imported with the die in Layout, and they need to be removed.

If you make all layes visible in Modeller, are they visible?

By inverting the spheres, you aren't actually solving the problem.

[SkipG]

While inverting the spheres would make the inside coloured, it seems like it's what richpr said:

Like richpr, I haven't seen the tut, but I would imagine the basic sequence would have been:

1) Make a cube in layer 1

2) Create the 'dots' using spheres in layer 2; colour as appropriate

3) Make layer 1 foreground and layer 2 background

4) Boolean subtract the dots from the cube

Since the spheres still exist in layer 2, they'll be imported with the die in Layout, and they need to be removed.

If you make all layes visible in Modeller, are they visible?

To answer your questions, I did steps 1 & 2 as described, but I made layer 1 the background and layer 2 the foreground. I then did a boolean intersection instead of subtract. When the tops of the spheres got lopped off, the inside wasn't colored, and I'm having problems trying to tell LW that I want to colour the inside of the sphere. Perhaps the issue is that the intersection results in the section of the sphere having a flat, coplanar surface which matches the surface of the cube.

The tutorial link is here

http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/modeling/dice/index.html

[tribbles]

Okay; having done a quick scan-read of the tut, I think they haven't told you to delete the spheres in the other layer.

For colouring after you've created the die, what you may be able to do (I'd need to run through the tut myself), is colour everything as the 'dot' colour, and then select only one of the non-dot polys of the cube. Press "]" (which should select all connected polys - might be "[" though; the wrong one is shear), and then set the colour of the die itself.

[SkipG]

Thank you VERY MUCH.

Doing the tutorial as written works fine (now). My problem was in not reading it correctly. I copied the ball I made and after placing the dots on each face, I deleted them from layer two. I was able to select the polys that made up the faces of the die and assign them both a name and a color. For the dots, I simply (re)defined the default layer color.

For what it's worth, I started out to learn Blender, but found that the program was hard to work with. Making the die in LW was much easier, once I grasped a few concepts.

--skip