CompuServe Messages

>>broken bulb… Hey Alex, I just tried this and made a decent broken bulb in about 10 minutes. (As usual, it takes longer to write about it than to do it!) I drew a half-bulb outline in the shaper and lofted it around a surf-rev path to make a bulb object. (Use plenty of steps on your shape and path to get lots of faces in the mesh. Note also that you'll probably have to fix the pole vertices of the surf-reved object.) Then I went into the editor and selected all the faces in the top section of the bulb and detached them (see paragraph below). Here, it is much easier if, from the top view, you 1st select the faces on the entire back half of the bulb and hide them. Detach the top section of the front half of the bulb, then hide that section, unhide the whole bulb, invert, and select and detach the broken top section of the back half of the bulb. Finally, attach the two top sections. Was that confusing enough? <g> Note that to get a realistic break, you can first select a bunch of faces by Fence, use Edge/Turn on appropriate edges to flip the direction of the diagonals, then select additional faces one at a time. This will allow you to guide the edge of the broken surface so it won't be "blocky". For a little more control, you can manually drag the vertices along the break line, but to keep the bulb from loosing its shape you would want to do this in a user view aligned with the face you were working on (Display/UserView/Align) and not drag a vertex too far. After I broke the bulb, I moved the top section up some and applied the library glass material with the transparency turned way down (under 10) to both sections and it looks pretty good. Another way to make this would be to pull vertices on perhaps a cylinder to make a "break surface" object, copy it and boolean subtract it from another object to give two mating halves. Then subtract each half from a copy of a light bulb object, giving a top & bottom section. However, then you must delete all the "internal" excess faces across the break. There may be other better ways, but I sure can't think of them right now. JKJ