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How to create a perfect sphere outline like this in c4d
Hi everyone,
I’m trying to recreate the outside part of the light in the first image in c4d for fun. But it’s driven me crazy that I’ve tried many different solutions and couldn’t come up with an ideal one. I tried to use spline outlines from a sphere and Sweep it with a rectangle, or using tubes with Cloner etc. The problems are the parts where the shapes intersect with each other(top, bottom and the middle), you can see in image 2 that they’re not smooth and you could see the shapes are intersecting with each other. Can anyone offer a good solution on this? Much appreciated!
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9 Replies
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Just to elaborate, the problem arises because the cross section of the parts is rectangular rather than arched. In order to have perfect intersections the cross section of the pieces would need an arched front and back that matched the curvature of the imaginary sphere which they are designed to form.
In the image below I have increased the width of the pieces to exaggerate the problem at the intersections. With narrower pieces the issue will be less noticeable, but always present.
Short of figuring out a way to design and draw a spline object that perfectly matched the curvature of the imaginary sphere, and then sweeping it to create the parts, it seems to me that the only way to avoid this issue would be to cut (model) the lamp out of a perfect sphere, just as you would need to do to create it in real life without resorting to grinding away the flaws at the intersections. As to how to go about that, I must leave it to the modelling experts to chime in, if it is at all possible.
I’m sorry that I don’t have an answer, but hopefully my analysis helped you to understand the issue better, and might lead you or someone else to a workable solution. I’ll keep thinking about it and let you know if I come up with anything and will be pleasantly surprised if and when someone shows an easy way to do this.
Good luck.
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Many thanks for your input on this Jim. It definitely helped me understanding the problem more. It’s driving me crazy because it seemed not to be a difficult modeling but in reality it gave me a lot of troubles of making it exactly what I wanted. Below is another approach I took this morning. It kind of solved the intersection issues but it’s not exactly what it looked like in the original picture. What I did was I made a high poly sphere and took the polygons I wanted and extruded them. The intersections in the middle are perfectly smooth now but the top and bottom parts are also getting narrower so each spline isn’t really rectangle. This is the closest I could get so far. Looking forward to see other people’s thoughts on this.
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there are at least a couple ways to do that, one is brute force build (the Null sets in the example various stages of the build) not hard really just a bit of time. and the other is Booles
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Good stuff Brian. I have been experimenting with booles, but don’t do this enough to come up with your excellent solutions. Thanks for your expertise.
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Thanks Brain, this is BRILLIANT!!!!!!
I’m trying to figure out two more things.
1. How did you cut the top and bottom ‘star’ part so the intersecting points are perfectly at the same same positions with the one next to it.
2. How did you turned the middle square into a rectangle. (I’m guessing you cut four more points on the corner and close the polygon. But how did you make the points at the exact same place)
I guess these two questions are somehow related – is how did you cut a single point between two objects. Apologize if my English is a bit confusing. I will explore more later this evening after I get home but would be amazing if you could shed some lights on this.
MANY THANKS!!
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Managed to figured it out by myself. It took a while tho and it might not be the most time efficient way but worked out great. Thank you again for the files Brain! Would never figure it out without those instructions!!!
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Did you try cloning tubes instead by (copy rotating) them holding down shift?
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Sorry for my post…I saw that you did write that you have tried cloning tubes…
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Maybe a Boolean (Union) could have worked also.
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