natep

Scene Animation7.mov Hi All, So...I'm losing my mind with this. Last year around this time I figured out how to do a simple animation in VW moving light sources inside a cylinder (see attached) to cast shadows. I remember that I used Spotlight->Visualization->Animate Scenes to do this. I also seem to remember that there was something non-intuitive about the process...something I had to do to make it work that wasn't just saving the scenes and then animating them. Fast forward 12 months and I'm trying to repeat this and cannot for the life of me figure out how I did it previously. I don't think it's that it was just broken in VW 21...I think it's probably user error, but I have beaten my head against this for longer than I care to admit and cannot make it work. Anyone able to help? Scene Animation7.mov

Thanks everyone for the great replies! I'm still not 100% where I want to be, but the method that got me here was 1) create NURBS curve 2) use helix tool to give a slight "wave" to the 2D curve 3) create a "circle of circles" 4) extrude along path. The thing I'm missing right now is that I'd really like the "rebar" to twist and overlap in a more organic manner instead of all running perfectly parallel, but the attached images are fine for where I am in the development process. That said, if anyone has any idea for how to twist and otherwise randomize the extrudes while keeping the general shape of arches...I'm all ears.

Thanks for the replies! I'm 100% confident that it's failing because of the way I'm building it. I'm just trying to figure out the right way to build it without a ton of trial and error. Where I am right now: I'm using the nurbs curve tool to create the "arch", then applying the helix tool to that. Then creating a circle and using duplicate array to make a "circle of circles"...then extrude along path of the curved helix. It's still not quite right, but at least I'm not breaking VW 🙂 What's going to be REALLY entertaining is watching VW try to render the light sources I intend to put inside of this thing when I can finally get it drawn.

Hi All, I've been a VW user for many years, but have mostly used it for theatrical lighting plots. In the last year I've started doing some sculptural work and am using VW to iterate on different ideas. I'm running into an issue currently. I'm trying to model something that, admittedly, is a rather complex geometric shape for VW to model. Essentially, I'm trying to make a tube out of a bunch of "rebar" that is twisted together and then take that tube and bend it over into an arch. My method so far is to use the helix tool and a circle and extruding along path, then mirroring that extrude, adding the two solids, duplicating, rotating the duplicate in plan, using add solids to combine, rinse and repeat until I have a cylinder. Next step would be to use the deform tool to bend this over into an arch. The resulting generic solid has a ton of surfaces vertices and empty space, so I'm not exactly surprised that VW becomes unresponsive when I try to use the deform tool. However, I'm not sure where VW's limit is for a function and it would be great if there were a way to vet an action before performing it and then having to force quit VW because it dutifully starts to try to calculate the impossible. So, two questions here. First, is there a way to have VW warn me or for me to check BEFORE VW starts a ten minute long calculation that will ultimately fail? Second, does anyone have a recommendation for a process to do this idea that WON'T break VW?