CompuServe Thread

You could try making a very flat disk. Then pull the edge vertices of this disk around to represent the jagged part of the bulb (be sure to keep it as thin as possible). Then Boolean away the jagged disk from the bulb (if you kept the jagged object thin enough the space should not be noticable). You might then be able to seperate the two halves into elements since they share no common faves or verts. I'm an artist so I would not need to be exact. If you need to have the edges line up with no gap at all that will take someone more creative than I. I could also suggest finding a friend that programs and getting him/her to write a simple program to do this for you. Hope this helps (HTH?) ————————————–Will

Hi Alex, –broken bulb– <<Is there a brilliant soul out there that might have a clue of how to do this?>> yup 🙂 Take a real lightbulb, break it and feed it piece by piece into your floppy drive 🙂 OK here it is but in order to do it (by my method), you'll need DISPLACE.pxp (from disk Yost disk #7) I'll assume that you've already made your bulb object. 1) make a copy of your bulb object but make sure it's in exactly the same place as the original object — this is important 2) make a grid box using GRIDS.pxp (30 grids width and length, 1 grid on the height, make the height a value that's at least 3 times the value of the width and length 3) scale the grid box so that if you look at the TOP view, the extents of the grid box are bigger than the diameter of the bulb. 4) load up the grid object in DISPLACE.pxp and select a fractal map. 5) increase the power setting of the displacement map to your own desire. — not so much that the displaced verts from the bottom plane get too close to the top plane 6) exit displace 7) re-position the now displacd grid box so that the top group of verts in the box lie where you want the break to occur. 8) IMPORTANT — mak sure that NONE of the verts from the bottom plane of the gridbox intersect the bulb. 9) Make a copy of the grid box in the same place as the original object 10) move one grid box directly up so that the bottom verticies of the box you are moving match up with the top verticies of the first grid box. 11) now click on create/object/boolean — click subtraction and OK. 12) click on one bulb and then either the top or bottom grid. 13) after it creates the boolean object, redraw the screen and and use the other grid box to boolean the opposite section of the bulb (click on the bulb object that is still whole, and then on the grid box) 14) now you've got two pieces of light bulb that fit together perfectly for added fun 🙂 take the bulb pieces into OPTIMIZE and tessalate them with and edge tension of about 25 — doing this will give really cool effects if you shine a spotlight with raytrace shadows ON. it makes small cracks appear in the shadow of the bulb. (when you use a transparent material). -Kyle

>>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