Welding beads on metal

[Jeremy Allen]

Hey Cows!

I’m trying to figure out how to simulate the beads produced by welding along the seams of metal. I have a basic rounded “bead” shape and I thought I could just clone this shape along the vertices or edges of the metal shapes, but I can’t seem to control the density. I’ve used the cloner in object mode and tried all the different options, but I’m not getting what I want. The other issue is corners. If the bead was on the inside or outside of a corner it would look a little different than it would if 2 pieces of metal were welded end to end.

I’m not looking for a step-by-step or a scene file, just some ideas about the basic approaches to doing something like this. I was hoping I could do it easily with cloner, but it may be a situation that calls for manually placing the beads where I want them…

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1

[Adam Trachtenberg]

I would try to do it with material sub-poly displacement. I’d create a texture showing the object’s UV mesh, then bring it into PS and make a brush that looks like welding and paint all of the edges that should be welded. In creating the UV mesh you would have to keep the “welded” UV edges contiguous to avoid seams. Or you could do it directly in BodyPaint using projection painting if you can’t get the UV mesh exactly right.

[Jeremy Allen]

Man, I hate to say it, but that pretty much went right over my head.. I think I get the idea in theory, but don’t know where to start. I wasn’t really looking for a step-by-step, as I do like to try and learn this stuff on my own, but could you possibly expand on that answer at all?

I have very little experience with C4D at this point, but I’ve been reading as much as possible. I’ve read about SPD, but never really used it yet. And I havent touched BodyPaint either..

Thanks for your time, I really do appreciate it.

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8core MacPro, 3.0 GHZ, 10GB RAM, OSX 10.5.6

C4D 11.5
AE CS3
FCP 6.0.1