Skip Talbot nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 17/08/2006 00:15:
> Lawrence W wrote:
>> "Trevor G Quayle" <Tin### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>>> "Lawrence W" <lwi### [at] csicablenet> wrote:
>>>> I've posted in the past about learning to create a tree macro all by 
>>>> myself.
>>>>  My trouble at this point is to figure out how to attach each block 
>>>> of truck
>>>> to each other when shifted out of alignment, a la not a perfectly 
>>>> straight
>>>> truck.
>>>>
>>>> If you look at the attached image, you'll see I've got a cylinder 
>>>> broken
>>>> into four chunks, along with a solid cylinder next to it.  I want 
>>>> this to
>>>> be my trunk.  I'm looking to find out how to properly locate the 
>>>> beginning
>>>> and end points of each chunk.  That way, I could properly rotate 
>>>> each chunk
>>>> to meet up with the one below it.
>>>>
>>>> Can anyone give me some help?  Thanks!
>>> If you know the coordinates of each point of the trunk, you don'tneed to
>>> rotate cylinders.  Cylinders do not need to be created vertical. Just
>>> specify the start and end coordinates and you are done.
>>>
>>> -tgq
>>
>> That's exactly my goal, but also the crux of my problem.  How am I 
>> going to
>> track the start and end coordinates?
>>
>> .... This may become a rather moot point as I find it MUCH quicker to use
>> POV-Tree.  Nonetheless, I'm really curious about how to do it from 
>> scratch
>> for the learning potential.
>>
>>
> The edges of the cylinder are going to jut out aren't they?  Maybe a 
> different shape should be used?  Sphere sweeps perhaps?  Although they 
> would probably bring the render to a screeching halt.  How about a mesh 
> object?  Then you can have a macro to define the number of faces around 
> the trunk (ie an octagon tree or something with a lot more faces to make 
> it look smooth).  You could could easily connect vertices as the tree 
> trunk curves, shrinking the radius as the tree goes to the top.  I'm not 
> entirely sure how to mesh the branch intersections smoothly though (I 
> guess they could just overlap).  The path of your tree trunk and 
> branches could be defined with a spline.  Then you'll have a nice 
> curving shape to start with, and picking start and end points for your 
> cylinders merely involves evaluating the spline at the spline intervals 
> you need.
> 
> Skip
You can use cones, maybe with spheres at the junctions.
If you use sphere_sweep, limit the lenght.
Using mesh is a prety good solution if you have several trees, like some 100's 
or more.
Make 1 or 2 close trees with cones or many sphere_sweep. Then, you use 2 ot 3 
different, scaled and randomly rotated mesh trees for the bulk of the forest.

-- 
Alain
-------------------------------------------------
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