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Converting Pen Lines to Generic Solids


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@trashcan Uh, no....that does not make sense. :-)

 

First of all a generic solid IS a solid object....filled solid.

Perhaps your nomenclature is off a bit. In my ancient brain, 'seeing the frame as a solid' would imply it is a filled. solid object. So....if I better understand your quest...would those 'lines' have a dimension/thickness ??  

Tom W is correct, in that you could do an extrude along path.  That would work. But, if you went that route, and used a small circle to use as the profile object, you would need to designate a diameter or radius of that circle.  

 

There may be another way.  

The sun just came up here in Tahiti, so let me make some coffee and investigate if there is another way. Don't hold your breath. :-). 

 

What is the end goal of this. if I may ask ?

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@trashcan Not sure in your example with your 'lines....how you created them to get the pyramid shape ?

 

It seems to me that the easiest way is use the multiple extrude approach to get the exact pyramid shape you want....which IS a solid object btw.

 

Attribute any line weight you wish, and simply tell it to have a "None" fill...It does tick the box you wanted as far as it being a 'solid' object', but you can see thru it because of the none fill.

It will render in Open GL or any of the Custom RW choices, and maintain the line weight thickness you have choosen.

 

Have a go at it and see if this achieves what you wanted.

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Exactly @Kevin K - I want those pen lines to have dimension and thickness and be treated as their own solids. Kind of like framing. Just the frames of the pyramid. 

 

The end goal here is to produce a projection beam that I can then import into After Effects to do a little render with video. If I have the beam lines (pyramid "frame") represented as solids then I can get it out as a clean OBJ. 

image.thumb.png.8c13389606a24a18986f2874f9b90682.png

Wish I was in Tahiti 🙂 

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@trashcan Man, you are speaking a language that is wayyyyy above my pay grade..."Projection Beam". ?? 

 

So.....be more specific. WHAT dimension do you want those 'lines' to have when they are fattened up?

And I assume that their final shape wants to be based upon a circle?    As opposed to a square or some other etherial shape. :-)

 

In this case, since you want to have them as individual objects, it will most likely involve an extrude along path, as has been suggested by others in this thread.

I think that grant_PD and Tom are on it. Tom W's example is good and the intersections of the objects would be fine if the diameter of the circle used for the extrude along path profile was a bit smaller.

Is that diameter critical for what you are doing??  

I am still a bit lost pertaining to the whole Projection Beam thing.

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Haha. Projection beam meaning the light the emits from the projector. I'm a projection / video engineer. 

 

If you use illustrator, this is how it's done there - you create your solid, you make the fill none and then all your left is the stroked path. You can then "outline" that stroke to turn the strokes into solids. So that's basically what I'm trying to do here, turn the pen strokes into solid frames. @Tom W. basically created what I'm trying to do, but wondering if there's a way to simply say "convert pen strokes to solids". 

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@trashcan Ok....now we are getting somewhere. :-)

VW doesn't have the infamous 'pen strokes to solids' option.

 

So, at the end of the day you will export the these items as an .OBJ file and import them into Illustrator?? 

So, this begs the question....why not just use Illustrator as you outlined, to obtain what you want?

 

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use the pyramid tool and convert to 3d polys, turn the fill off, decompose each face? I'm not AE guru so I don't know how this imports for you.  You could also use the create projector tool and show cone, then do a high level ungroup.  Attached is my exported pyramid, after converting to 3d polys I then decomposed the polys into it's lines.

pyr2.obj.zip

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Ah snap, your OBJ isn't coming through in AE for whatever reason though it is showing the vertices data. Very strange. I suspect Tom W's solve is probably the move, though I'm not sure how to do it. 

 

Here's my dummy check (this is your pyramid):

 

image.thumb.png.7c7cd07750af3a3e8fb743dbae16f813.png

 

Imports into AE looking like:

image.thumb.png.5e32abf686eda8561593dec5b5b0a4d3.png

 

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