Perfectly Round?

[enigma]

Hey all, i'm having a little trouble with a model i'm doing. I had these nice pictures showing my problem but the floppydisc sucked. If you watch the attached file you can see my points being to assymetric. I was looking for a fast way to make the shape perfectly round..

I figure this is a newbie post so please help me :)

Oh forgot to tell that it's a SubD mesh and the mesh gets hard edges due to the highpoly fact. (that's why i want it perfectly round)

[Matt]

Excuse me if I'm just reading this wrong, but it looks like a tube to me, so are you saying you want a perfectly round tube?

I'm not very knowledgable on sub-d modelling, but I always thought to create a perfectly round sub-d circle (ignore the tube part for a minute) you need to create a square and then hit the 'tab' key, problem is, I tried that and it's not perfectly round!

So forget sub-d's, the easiest way to create a circle or tube is to use the 'disc' tool, and run it along a spline to create the tube itself using the 'rail extrude' tool.

If you do decide to use that method you must download this plugin:

Align to Rail by Carl Merritt (http://www.m2estudios.com/Files/AignToRail.zip)

It aligns the source shape to the end of the spline path (this should have been a function built into LightWave from the start IMO)

Hope that helps and apologies if you knew all that and was asking something else!!!

Cheers
Matt

[Skonk]

Im pritty sure there is no quick, automated way of doing it (assuming im right in what i think ur asking), the way id do it is to create a circle in the next empty layer and put it in the background, then drag the points to match the background circle. Should only take a few minutes to do.

James..

[enigma]

Matt: I understand that you think my model to be a cylinder, but actually (out of view) it's a three-headed snake that will be the tail to a lion-like animal..


SpankDaddy: This was the method i was to use as a last resort.. It works, but i thought there could some faster way.. but hey who says life is fair? :)

Thanks

[TerryFord]

Originally posted by enigma
I was looking for a fast way to make the shape perfectly round..

Pole 2 tool might get you there (Right-drag out the circle you want and then left-jiggle for best circular fit. Alternative; stick a cylinder in a background layer, scale out the points so they're outside the cylinder, then use Point Fit to shrink the points around the background cylinder.

Point Fit here;
http://www1.plala.or.jp/Otsuka/graphics/plugins/POINTFIT.HTML


Regards,
Terry

[enigma]

Perfect, thanks a lot, that was just what i was looking for..

Just hope that my inspiration doesn't fall during the modelling process (as it always does.. :(


Maybe there'll be a wip as soon as i get up and running

[Gollum]

As an alternative you could also use LW's native 'Spherize' tool, which is made for just this purpose. It will turn almost anything perfectly circular (or spherical), problem is that it can be a bit tricky to work with (ideally for it to work a selection should to be centered) and scales the deformed geometry down to ~1m so you have to reposition and rescale it back afterwards. Point Fit is probably better suited for your needs, just mentioning spherize to show there's a tool for this kind of stuff actually shipping with LW. ;)

Good luck with your character!