CompuServe Messages

>>lofting RECYCLE… Julieta, I looked at the recycle symbol mesh you uploaded. I haven't noticed if you got any help on this yet, so if you have, just ignore the rest of this. <g> As you implied, the bent arrow would be tricky to loft. I got a start by creating a curved path and applying a teeter deformation to a thin box shape. This was a big pain and pretty messy, though. Do you have the BonesPro IPAS? There may be a much easier way to do this, but I was able to bend a thin band very close to your shape with the help of Bones. It was a little tedious, but in case you are interested … -Loft a thin, flat band with a fairly dense subdivision (say 10×30) oriented horizontally in the top view -Create a single thin bone and rotate it 30 degrees in the top view (to match your bend). -Create a linear array of bones from the first one (I made 48 to keep it smooth). -Link them all together, left to right, and set the pivot points appropriately -Rotate a user view 30 deg to align with the end of the bones. Rotate the root bone and those in the bend to match the curve of the original arrow. From a second user-view perpendicular to the first one, rotate the entire linked tree to match the tilt of the bend. -In Bones, create a single morph object which is the finished arrow (minus the head). Using Bones would also let you animate the arrows bending into shape, if you wanted to. If you don't have Bones, you may be able to loft the band down a curved path either by the careful use of deformations or by placing a series of shapes on the path and rotating each one. Hey! I just thought of another thing that will work and is a LOT easier. You can apply linear mapping coordinates to even a bent object by the use of morphing and snapshot: -Make a morphable twin object that has the same structure but is flat instead of bent. (You might make this in Autocad or manually flatten out a copy of your existing arrow) -Apply the desired mapping coordinates to the flat object. -Morph from the flat one to the bent one in the keyframer. -On the frame that contains the morph, create a snapshot copy of the object. This will create a new object in the Editor that has shape of the bent object but the mapping coordinates of the flat one. This would be a lot quicker (it took me about 2 minutes) than the lofting and cheaper and easier than the Bones. I developed this technique a long time ago to allow me to use a morph target's mapping coordinates instead of those of the morph's source, and have used it several times as a home-made mapping coordinate editor. Hope this helps. Good luck! JKJ, Oak Ridge, TN