Masking more than one item with ‘spline mask’ in Cinema 4D Lite.

[Steve Bentley]

I havent’ worked with “lite” but is the heirarchy button turned on or off in the extrude object?

[Tedd Kidd]

Steve – I have tried it both ways (with hierarchical checked and no checked). When it is not checked the extruding goes away completely.

[Brian Jones]

you will have to take the two splines under the Null and put them in a Connect object or another Spline Mask set to Union instead

[Tedd Kidd]

I don’t believe the “Connect” object is available in the Lite version.

Can you explain what you mean by “another Spline Mask set to Union instead”?

[Brian Jones]

assuming the Spline Mask is the same in Lite as in studio (probably) it should be the settings in the spline mask when you have it selected. Mode for the first spline mask (which contains the Bakery spline) should be B Subtract A assuming the bakery spline is the big one you are cutting parts out from. And the second spline mask which will contain the two smaller (I assume) splines B1 and B2 should have it’s mode set to Union

Spline Mask (B subtract A)
— Spline Mask (Union)
——B1
——B2
—Bakery

[Tedd Kidd]

Brian:

Thank you, that worked!

In the word ‘Bakery’ there are several areas that I want to ‘cut out’. How would I go about that (since “union” offers only an A Union B option)?

Thanks for your help!

[Brian Jones]

ah, it’s a word, should have guessed with the B1 and B2. You can have any number of spline masks nested and could do all of what you want (probably) but there is likely a much better way – multiple splines inside each other (like the holes in the “B”) form holes in an Extrude work when they are all one spline – to combine a number of splines into one use the Connect command. Just select the objects you want to connect and right-click and choose Connect (or Connect and Delete to get rid of the original bits)

here’s an example (much simpler font) with one where the word is made of all the splines separate and a second (a direct copy) where I did nothing but select all the splines and do a Connect and Delete.

This will work for whole words or letter by letter.

[Tedd Kidd]

Very helpful! Best I can tell, the ‘Connect’ and ‘Connect and Delete’ functions are not available in Cinema 4D LITE.

I will try your first method of nesting multiple Spline Masks together. This has been a great learning experience.

[Brian Jones]

it was in the Functions Menu long ago, now it’s in Mesh/Conversion menu, if the menus are different in Lite then if the Find Command thing is active try Shift-C and type ‘connect’ into the little dialog that pops up.