This forum post was brought to my attention by a tweet from @sketchbookinc, it is a really handy illustration of polygons, stepping and moving poles. For those of you that are fairly proficient at modelling, then this is a handy reminder. Those of you new to modelling, there are some really good techniques demonstrated here that might stop you pulling your hair out.

Here’s one of the images, but visit the forum to see both. It is definitely worth it and they’re not my images to share, so it is only fair that I send you to the original post to see for yourself.

Polygon Table

It seems the generous guy behind this is Pedro Amaro Santos, so I thank you Pedro for sharing this valuable information.

If you check the forum post, you’ll see it also contains a link to an interactive guide to creating elbows that Pedro has created. This is a great way to look at the different types of rounding you can achieve through SDS modelling and I’d definitely recommend having a look here too.

Creating elbows with SDS

This is what makes the web such a fantastic place, people are so willing to share the knowledge. Awesome stuff, thanks Pedro!

Imagine you get sent a logo for a job you’re working on. You need to animate all the separate parts of the logo, you’ll need to create an ExtrudeNURBS for each individual spline. There could be quite a few splines to deal with. Here’s a quick tip that shows you how to generate an individual ExtrudeNURBS for each spline you have.

Place all the splines under one ExtrudeNURBS. Name the splines appropriately.

Then click the hierarchal checkbox in the ExtrudeNURBS Object tab.

Once you’ve done this, adjust any parameters on the ExtrudeNURBS that you want to.

If you then press ‘c’ or choose Functions > Make Editable. The hierarchy will change and you’ll be left with an individual ExtrudeNURBS for each spline. The ExtrudeNURBS will take their name from the spline and all the parameters you adjusted will be identical on each one.

Here’s a quick movie showing you the technique. Quite a simple trick but if you didn’t know it then hopefully you’ve found it useful.

Thanks
Tim

edit : here’s a link to a quicktime as the blogger movie is far to small, sorry about that.

Easy Extrudes