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MY House - let's see if this goes anywhere...
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These pages are a copy of the official truespace forums prior to their removal somewhere around 2011.
They are retained here for archive purposes only.
MY House - let's see if this goes anywhere... // Work in Progress
Post by alionsonny // Aug 4, 2008, 5:44am
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alionsonny
Total Posts: 26
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Hi Folks,
it's just me again :D So today I decided to make a little startproject for my further exploring. I am not shure if I'll get this done, because I'm used to other tools and Ts gives me a hard time in terms of learning.
Ok, here's what I wanna do for now. I wanna build a simple basic little house. No big artistic approach here. Just testing around and learn how it is done.
I invite each and every reader of this thread to give me advise on how to improve things. I want to learn. This is why I'll tell as many details about how I do this and that as possible. If you think that something could be done quicker, smarter or however better in a different way, don't hesitate to let me know your way of getting things done.
So here's what I did first: I build and sized 4 cubes so they make up the walls. I built and scaled another 2 cubes to make the ceiling and floor.
For the windows, I made a boolean union of a cube and a cylinder to have a drill. I cutted the (front and right wall) windows out using this drill via boolean subtraction.
Then I made another drill with a vertically a bit squashed cylinder and a cube for the door and cutted it out using boolean subtraction.
Then I made cubes for drills to cut out the left wall panorama window and for backyard porch door for the back wall and cutted them out via boolean subtraction. All was done in about half an hour. Not bad for a newbie, I think :D
That's what came out of it:
Left-Front:
http://img515.imageshack.us/img515/4701/rendertofile00001uz5.png (http://imageshack.us)
Right-Front:
http://img80.imageshack.us/img80/2442/rendertofile00002ct2.png (http://imageshack.us)
Right-Back:
http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/6841/rendertofile00005jk0.png (http://imageshack.us)
Right-Left:
http://img367.imageshack.us/img367/8153/rendertofilea00006fz9.png (http://imageshack.us)
Note: The material of ther house is, hmm... something that is the result of me trying to get a basic neutral material. I think this has gone somewhat wrong.
You see some rendering error/faillures at some parts. I ask myself where they come from. No idea. All walls, ceiling and floor are placed correctly. I don't know why those gaps and lines appear where they shouldn't. Has anybody an idea what is going wrong there.
But anyway, my graphicscard freaks out quite often while navigating in workspace. Sometimes it shows black blocks scattered across place while rotating a view or while physical simulations. My Gfxcard is a NVidia GForce 8600 GTS with latest drivers. Latest DirectX is also here. No clue why it causes problems. Sometimes it crashes Truespace completely and two times it even caused a Bluescreen and immediate system restart. Happens nowhere else, just in Truespace.
But, what do you think about the start? Next I'll build a roof for the house and then move on to windows, doors and all that stuff. As I am in no way thru with surfacing, I'll keep all stuf in the current material.
Thanks for your interest
Sonny |
Post by TomG // Aug 4, 2008, 5:49am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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Those "hatched white" areas in the image show that there are two faces occupying exactly the same space. A render engine doesn't know what to do in this case - which face to show and which not to show, since they are both in exactly the same place.
Moving one face so it doesn't exist in the same location is another will solve that.
Booleans can cause issues due to n-gon faces and faces with holes. A forum search will turn up much discussion on that, it's why some modelers rate booleans as "evil" and not to be used except when unavoidable. tS is very forgiving, some other apps (and some render engines) are not. You can auto triangulate but it can lead to unpleasant geometry. Manual triangulation is often best. Not sure if that might tie in to some real-time rendering issues, I don't think so, but not impossible.
HTH!
Tom |
Post by alionsonny // Aug 4, 2008, 5:57am
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alionsonny
Total Posts: 26
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Yes, you are right about those surfaces. And I allready thought that this may be an issue. So I'll think how to get this solved, because moving surfaces will bring the whole thing out of ballance, I think.
Why are booleans bad? ;) I couldn't live without them. What a bunch of work would it be to do the same shown above without booleans? First, because it is such a fun in Truespace, I thought about doing the whole house by extruding surfaces from cubes. But I like that round arched stuff. Ok, one could do this by rotating surfaces, extruding them and then maybe appliying SSD... but seriously, that's a not so easy way to go.
This is why I started this thread: If one knows how it is done different, better, smarter -> I wanna know it. But I can think of no easier, qucker way to get that wall with the cutted out windows without boolean subtraction... can anybody? |
Post by Nez // Aug 4, 2008, 6:22am
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Nez
Total Posts: 1102
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Booleans are indeed a very useful tool and a real time saver, especially when new to modelling. I still use them a lot, and with some care there' no reason not to do so.
But many will caution against them, with some good reasons such as those Tom has given. In many circumstances they can cause problems. Some of the newer tools in workspace for drawing polygons on surfaces etc allow openings to be relatively easily added to wallls etc (Jack Edwards can probably explain a lot better, no doubt he'll drop by soon and offfer some advice!).
Tom beat me to it on the faces in the same place at the wall corners - you may only need a tiny adjustment in position of one face to eliminate this, or you may be able to boolean union the walls together to merge teh faces - but this can be flaky too...
With regards your graphic card, I believe the 8600 should be decent but there have been some problems with nvidia cards if you do a seacrh - you may need to change to the beta drivers - there are some threads on this subject too somewhere.
With the material, it looks like the ambient setting is very high, so that it's almost glowing? Or the lighting is very intense? Maybe try a different lighting preset and see if that helps.
You're off to a reasonable start - keep plugging away! |
Post by RAYMAN // Aug 4, 2008, 7:43am
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RAYMAN
Total Posts: 1496
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A forum search will turn up much discussion on that, it's why some modelers rate booleans as "evil" and not to be used except when unavoidable. tS is very forgiving, some other apps (and some render engines) are not.
Tom
I must throw in that booleans are only rated evil by polygon modelers !
They are part of the modeling process of nurbs modelers most of the time and
you do NOT have the same problems with nurbs !
So if you search the Moi3d forum or the Rhino forum boolean cutting
is first choice ! Thats what sets those 2 worlds apart and makes it
so different !;)
Peter |
Post by kena // Aug 4, 2008, 7:45am
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kena
Total Posts: 2321
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yes - lower the ambient on the textures, and make them a bit darker - that will help with the "shine" |
Post by Jack Edwards // Aug 4, 2008, 8:08am
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Jack Edwards
Total Posts: 4062
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The main reason booleans are "evil" for new modelers is because it stunts their growth in learning how to polygon model. Instead of figuring out how to make the shape with cuts, extrudes, and vertex pulling it's all to easy to think in terms of primitives and just boolean add or subtract. Booleans also tend to make poor geometry for SDS since it's usually non-quad and there likely hasn't been a focus on edge loop placement needed to maintain the shape of the model.
That said with careful planning a boolean can save a lot of time and work. With poor planning it can make more work for you later in cleaning up poor geometry.
For cutting out doors there's now a great feature added that lets you polydraw the door or window outline then boolean mode with the extrude tool to cut the outline through the wall. ;) The non boolean way would be to draw the outline on both sides, then either bridge the two polygons or delete the two polygon inside the outlines and use the form face tool to create the interior polygons for the doorway or window opening.
BTW, the black artifacts on screen are usually a sign of the video card overheating... |
Post by TomG // Aug 4, 2008, 8:36am
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TomG
Total Posts: 3397
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There are apps you can download to monitor your video card's heat, if overheating is the cause. Also note that I've found my 8800 fan was not speeding up or slowing down based on heat on installing such apps - it was running at a constant speed. I could tell because when I cranked up the speed, I heard more fan noise than I normally get from it :)
So you may want to use those and check the temp, and also maybe override the fan to a higher speed if it is running hot. Between 60 and 70 degrees would be about normal for an 8800 under stress, and I try and keep it below 70 degrees if I can, normally I run the fan at 60% idle, 80% when gaming, or 100% when gaming on a hot day :)
HTH!
Tom
BTW good comments on booleans. NURBS are a whole different thing, since the polygons for the render engine are built at render time and not at boolean time, and usually you are dealing with rounded surfaces anyway which have more divisions in their faces - its when you boolean things from large single flat faces that the real problems start, and that's less likely a situation with NURBS (and even then triangulation will be done at render time to avoid the one large face with floating vertices). Also they are not evil when used properly, indeed, and if you are staying in tS and never exporting to another app or render engine, then you should be fine as tS is very forgiving of n-gons. But if you do go to other apps, you'll find you spend a lot of time correcting artefacts if you haven't used booleans with care! |
Post by alionsonny // Aug 4, 2008, 9:55am
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alionsonny
Total Posts: 26
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Ok, folks, lots of answers. I hope I can get all points into that post that need to be answered.
For the GFXCard: It is a passively cooled card and it never has probelms, crashes and stuff when I play the most GPU intensive games. For example I love playing games like Elderscrolls Oblivion amd Gothic 3 at highest details. I have no problems with this. The system never crashe and I had no graphics faillures even on hot days and nights.
I love booleans whatever you say ;) It is damn intuitive to take an object as a drill and just cut it out or merging objects. Thats an intuitive natural way. I often ran across those folks who want me to paint edges and cut geometry by splines. My splines never look like I want them to look... seriously. I would not know how to build the shape of my windows using a spline. Splines to me are allways a secret. I cannot get them into the shape I want. When I pull one thing it does not just affect this thing but several others. I is damn confusing.
Freehand painting of curves with a mouse is even less fun. I hate it. Something allways goes wrong. Glueing together a box and a cylinder, make it a window shape. That's geometrically perfect. NHothing can beat this. So why messing around with splines,additional vertices etc.?
I read thru some of the postings in this forum regarding the "evilness" of booleans. To me they make not much sense. But I am no professional 3D artist. Maybe one must be one of the Super-Professionals to get in trouble with booleans. Booleans seem to be nice to hobbyists and seem to hate professionals *LOL* I didn't get really why booleans are dangerous up to now. Maybe an exzorcist may help to get the evil boolean Demon out of me. :D
Thanks
Sonny |
Post by kena // Aug 4, 2008, 10:03am
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kena
Total Posts: 2321
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Often when you import booleaned objects to another program, the booleaned hole is treated as a solid. Adding a layer of Subdivision Surface and then removing it will cause there to be some extra edges connecting your "hole" to the edges of the mesh and solve that issue. Most of the time.
I started using TS because of the boolean functions being so intuitive. At that time I had no plans to use other products, so it worked fine. Until I decided to get Vue and tried importing.
Stephen's True-Vue Tutorial (http://www.caligari.com/products/trueSpace/ts5/Courses/trueSpaceVue.asp?Cate=Training&Subcate=Fundamental) Fixed that issue for me and I highly recommend it. even if you do not have Vue. |
Post by RAYMAN // Aug 4, 2008, 1:19pm
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RAYMAN
Total Posts: 1496
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Sonny I PM´d you about the booleans !
There is no better way of doing what you are at the moment in
Truespace but we would love to see the aditional tools that
one can find in Sketchup to do this much cleaner and faster !
Here is a video !
We definitly want this functionality in Truespace too !
Peter |
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