Newbie questions, transforming object, exporting single face of object

GS089

GS089

Member
Hi,
I am searching for an easy to use 3D program and I got to the hint to have a look on cheetah3d. So I used the demo for a few minutes and it looks really promising.
Maybe I have some more questions, and if I choose Cheetah I will watch some tutorials, but for now I have these questions.

1. Is it possible to export a single faces of our object? Maybe even all at once? That object contains only of a few simple geometric objects like a rectangular. So after building my sculpture I want to export the each faces/plates that I can lasercut from 3mm hdf wood and build that sculpture. I hope that make sense.. :)

2. Is it possible to transform a object not only in its three axis, Would like to transform it on a round axis.. so I build an object with a lot of rectangular shapes.. and then I want to select all and make a loop of it.

Thanks a lot
Gerald

P.S.: All is to to construct a scultpure I want to cut 3mm hdf wood.
 
Hi Gerald and welcome.
Yes all possible; you need to get in touch with UV unwrapping and the UV Editor. Means you separate the polygons by settings seams for each polygon, then unwrap the polygon selection and Cheetah3d tries to put the puzzle onto a square which you can then save as a PDF as Vector data for the freedom of scalability. To arrange a bunch of polygons in spherical or cylindrical ways there are modifiers available. If you could share imagery we can lead you through the process. If you need advanced packing I can send a link of a specialized free app which handles vector data quite easily.
 
Hi Gerald

* The demo mode does not allow saving a model, however, you can experiment with all of the C3D tools available via the menues or the pop ups.
* I suggest that you upload a couple of your conceptual sketches and we can quickly analyse the options available with C3D.
 
For working with UV mapping there is a separate special selection tool "Group Select".

It is worth remembering.

I jammed three cubes together, and used Boolean addition to make one object.
I made all edges into Seams, UV unwrapped with the LSCM setting.

It looks like it worked like a charm.

UV Group Select.jpg
 
Cool, that sounds great, I think I will buy it very soon.

Here is a sculpture I made which is different from my new idea, but it shows the same aesthetic I want to get.

So I will build these different 2D figures as 3D objects and then connect them:
www.myswitzerland.com

Rhythmus 23 | Schweiz Tourismus

www.myswitzerland.com www.myswitzerland.com

Here you can see the second figure as 3d wood sculpture, its the "table" for the acrylic box.

Then I want to connect these figures (wherever it is possible, otherwise I will decide on my own where the point leads to) so that they morph from figure to figure. I want to play with with morphing (make it morph faster/longer etc) or even as a circle. And then the so build 3d sculpure will be one massive hollow sculpture made from laser cut 3mm hdf.

All in all I want to experiment with that, maybe I have to change my idea, but thats part of the fun.

Hope that make sense.

Thanks a lot
Gerald
 
With Frank and Helmut and onboard and others on the forum,
you'll have great support, and I'll always help out when I can.
 
Thanks a lot, so I think I will buy it and will make the different 2d figures at first and then the thinking will begin. Cheetah3D seems to be exactely what I need. And it seems it has a nice community, thanks Frank, Helmut and ZooHead! :)
Gerald
 
ZooHead said:
For working with UV mapping there is a separate special selection tool "Group Select".

It is worth remembering.

I jammed three cubes together, and used Boolean addition to make one object.
I made all edges into Seams, UV unwrapped with the LSCM setting.

It looks like it worked like a charm.

View attachment 38406
Click to expand...
Wohoo, perfect!
 
I did some more playing around and testing and Cheetah seems to be very good for this process.

I made a more complex model section, selected all edges
and used Selection/Toggle Seam, creating the cut lines. (green lines)

I unwrapped the UVs with LSCM but it may work fine with either choice.
In this case only one UV island rotated differently but that is easy to
fix by "Pinning" two of its points and unwrapping again.

I included the PDF Cheetah generated in case you want to play with it.

LaserCuts.jpg
 

Attachments

  • LaserCuts pdf.zip
    4.7 KB · Views: 157
When every edge is a seam, Cheetah rotates the UV islands so orientation is confusing.
By selectively toggling seams off, and rerunning the unwrapping,
Cheetah will nicely unwrap/unfold UV sections.

Seams Surgery.jpg
 
Hi, thanks a lot! I opened your pdf in illustrator and everything looked looked. I bought Cheetah yesterday, now I will have to work through some tutorials.. I really don't know anyrthing, I have to google UV and I dont know what LSCM is... google says "Linguistic supply Chain Management" lol. The next step is to build to different figure before connecting them, after that i think I will definitely show you my first result and I wil have some questions. :)
 
I don't want to overload you with info, I'm anticipating future questions
so you can come back and it will make more sense later.

You'll need to know how to work with and edit objects
so don't hesitate to ask questions any time.
 
Thanks, very motivating! I am looking forward to work with cheetah... but it will need some time, I hope in the next months... :)
 
Hi, I am working on my project, building everything with planes. One big problem is, that the snapping funktion did not work all the time, I tried everyting, zooming, hiding other elements, new planes, it just dont snap in one of ten times, and then it will never snap again on that point. That is a big problem and stops everything. Do other also have that problem from time to time?
Thanks
 
No - worked and still works as expected. Can you give a step-by-step instruction on how you go about it please? Your description is rather vague.
 
Hi, thanks, yes my workflow description is not very accurate... :) I hope I am not doing it wrong because it work most of the time. I think it does not work sometimes when two edges/points a very close together. Another thing.. sometimes if I transform/move one point of a square, the whole element transforms as well...a little bit. For example, taking a square with ABCD and move A, B is moved, too.... this also happen only when to the points a relatively close together. My workaround is to copy just that few elements i am working on to a new file, make the edits, and copy the new element to my scupture, it works pretty good, because it's placed at the correct position when pasting it.

Since my sculpture is nearly finished, I wonder how to transform it to a ring... for now I grouped everything and that way I could could transform it in all three axis, but now I want to see how it looks being transformed to a ring, do you have any tips? :)

Thanks a lot!
Gerald
 
Without seeing the object I can only make uneducated guesses.

If you upload the file it would be the best as we can troubleshoot the construction.
 
Mmh - when A is moved and B follows you´re in edge mode. Try the following: enable "Transform" in the transform tool (the arrows a highlighted and make sure you´re in component mode - means point/edge/ or polygon mode - nothing is selected; hold down shift+alt and hover over your plane with the cursor. When for instance a point gets highlighted you can click+drag to move it to another object or let it snap when "Component" snapping is enabled. This way you don´t have to extra select anything in first place and can freely move parts around. Snapping is not "welding" by the way - if you want to glue different points from different objects together you need to "merge" the geometry first and use "Optimize" to "weld close vertices".
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top