CGTalk - Complex spline loft

T0NiC

01-04-2006, 04:54 PM

For my '65 Lincoln Continental model (http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=230597) (yes I'm still working on that baby) I'm trying to recreate the "Continental" logo that is on the rear sides, see attachment.

First I tried an alpha and bump mapped chrome texture but that only looked decent enough for renders of the entire model. I'm looking for much higher detail.

I've then tried extruding a spline of the logo but couldn't get the fillet to look quite right.

Now I have prepared four splines to loft but when I try them I get the result you see in the second attached image. I've checked that the starting points of the splines are close to eachother. I'm guessing that the difference in number and positions of intermediate points causes this but I have no clue how to fix this.

Any ideas?

3DKiwi

01-04-2006, 05:25 PM

Hi. I'm not sure lofting is the right way to go about it. If it was me I would project the text spline on to the body and then copy those points into an empty polygon object (after doing a current state to object command). Then use the create polygon tool to build polygons between the points and then finally extrude the polygons. This allows you to use hypernurbs. You may need to experiment with the initial text spline's type and number of intermediate points. The current state to object command makes intermediate points into real points. Because you'll be using hypernurb, you can get away with a lot less points. You'll also need to make sure the empty polygon object has its axis at the same location as the text spline for the points to be positioned properly when you copy and paste them in the structure manager.

If you've seen the 55 Chevvy tutorial this is how the Belair logo was done I recall.

Hope this helps.

3DKiwi

R1PPER

01-04-2006, 05:48 PM

Errr.....isn't this just make a compound path in illustrator and extrude with fillet caps?

Obviously if you want 100% then you will have to use 3DKiwi's method, but i recommend cheating it with a loft and moving on to the next section :)

T0NiC

01-04-2006, 11:39 PM

I ended up modeling it largely by hand although I did use 3DKiwi's method of taking the points from the spline which was very usefull.

Thank you guys!

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