[Brian Jones]

Model the nozzle as two pieces make the tip a child of the base so it follows the base but it can be ‘removed’ when desired. As long as you are not trying to animate the base while you are cutting off the tip it should be ok. If you are animating the base at the same time a Constraint Tag (probably Parent mode) would likely be better

[Brian Jones]

Illustrators origin is the bottom, left corner. If you put your illustrator spline(s) down there before saving for C4D they will center better.

[Brian Jones]

Knife Tool slice in plane mode might be a good way

[Brian Jones]

Sizing the FFD is a good thing but do it via the Grid Size setting in the FFD’s attributes not by scaling.

[Brian Jones]

Something is wrong with your FFD it’s rectangular but it’s grid size shows as 23.962 m 23.962 m 23.962 m so it should be a cube. Maybe it’s scale has been changed…. Anyway just remove and put in another and resize it to fit without scaling it, as long as it’s a child of the main extrude object it will work. Though it looks like you’ll likely want to subdivide the object so you get a smooth bend.

[Brian Jones]

Camera rotation, yes? check off Preferences/Common/Reverse Orbit

[Brian Jones]

I don’t think S&T will do transparency when exporting to Illustrator and Flash export is separate and I don’t think it does transparency at all. C4D will do probably anything you are thinking about but for transparency in Flash you might need to do it in Flash unless someone else out there knows better… or incorporate into Flash by making the C4D anim into an .flv

[Brian Jones]

What kind of transparency? All transparent-ish or see through the front wall but not the back?

With transparency the joins need to be perfect or you see them. Check out this way to build, I can post the method later but it’s related to this Arches tute I did after seeing Mark Simpson’s Arches tute here on the Cow – which is why they look similar but it gave me an idea and the method is different and not bad for doing pipe joins it turns out.

[Brian Jones]

Nice! There’s always more than one way, that looks like a good intersection. What material are the pipes made of?

[Brian Jones]

[Brett Thayer] “Should I go higher? Say 96? “

The higher you go the smoother but more work to connect the bits later. I would try going lower and let subD surfaces (HyperNurbs) smooth it later – assuming that gives enough control. HyperNurbs are very flexible though and there is more than one way to get smooth bits and sharp bits in the same object. In the example I sent the edges are relatively sharp as I bevelled them to increase the geometry and sharpen the nurb – you have to have a basic understanding of how hypernurbs works to know what to expect.

[Brett Thayer] “Now I copy the section parts I need to remove and create new booleans to remove the unneeded sections? “

yeah, if you want things to fit together and you need holes to connect to there is nothing better to cut the hole than with the object to connect with. The geometry matches perfectly and connecting later will be easier.

Booles make extra triangles (they have to) wherever possible clean that up before connection, some tri polys can be turned back into quads, some places points can be Welded.

Part of the problem with the first example was that the rims of the pipes touch if that has to be ah well, but if not it’s a lot cleaner to just join pipes.

I’ll take a look at the next one in a bit