Lathing Sculped Prims in BLender

Ok, even though I'm still fairly new at Blender, I've managed to come up with a technique for a lathing effect (since you cannot use the spin functions for making sculpties).

It's my first tute ever, and I had issues with YouTube not liking the initial video that SnagIt spit out, but after converting it, I was able to get it uploaded. The quality both audio and video wasn't as good as I hoped, and I'll try to fix that in future tutes, but it's acceptable as this technique is fairly simple and straight forward, and the quality isn't that bad.

I decided to go ahead with making the tute because Gaia Clary was asking about how I'd done the leg for my leg lamp, and I've been wanting to do some tutes to 'give back' to the community which helps me out so much.

This is only half of what I did for making the leg lamp because a human leg isn't perfectly symmetrical from all angles, but I did this for the profile view, and did the same thing except I didn't constrain to X and Y when I scaled from 90 degree, I just simply scaled the X axis the second time. This tutorial shows lathing out a light bulb, and will work for spindles, chess pieces, urns, wine glasses, and the like that normally would be lathed using the Blender Spin function.

Feel free to comment! I hope to be doing more in the future and hope this tute is helpful.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4VdrLnwoNo

Comments can be posted on the YouTube page directly, here, or IM me in world if you have any questions.

I hear no audio at all.

Hmm, I'm hearing it. It is a tad low, but I'm hearing it. try turning up your volume. The plan is to hike up the gain on my microphone for the next video hopefully curing this problem, but you should be able to hear it.

I can hear something with the sound turned all the way up.

I think I'd try redoing the audio.

Working on it as you type... I tinkered around with the microphone output settings and just finished a test. The audio is much better. Sorry about the low audio. I'll probably wind up redoing the whole thing with better audio, but at the moment I'm wondering why YouTube doesn't like the file that my screen cap program outputs. Thinking of looking for something different that will output something that YouTube will like. At the moment, I have to recode it, and that takes alot of time.

EDIT:

Ok, it seems to all be working now. I successfully uploaded and tested a new short video, and YouTube is accepting the straight video output from SnagIt, and I have the audio issue fixed as well. I just need to redo the video and reupload it. Will probably take a hour and a half or so.

Hi, Johan

Thank you for your video about lathing a light bulb. I have watched it and despite the fact that it works i have the feeling that your approach could be made more efficient. Here are some tips, how i would do it:

1.) I would start with a sphere, although it does not matter too much. Cylinder would work more or less the same, but as a lightbulb is a bended sphere anyways...

2.) I would enable proportional editing. Then you would be able to shape the bulb much(!) faster with by far fewer mouse clicks and drags. (you will need Crease (SHIFT E) at some places )

3.) I would NOT add an additonal layer of subsurf. It does not help in this particular case. It just makes you feel, that you have more control over the shape. But in reality the baker will do an interpolation to find the best fitting sculptmap... And at the end you have 4 times more vertices to deal with and you generate MUCH more work than necessary...


But there is even another cool way which makes lathing sculpted prims true for you . This method has first been described by domino while we where about integrating my Nurbs2Sculpty script into primstar (which has meanwhile been fully integrated and improved by Domino as he is certainly 1000 times better in programming than me

So here is the idea (works for rotation symmetric objects only)

1.) Create an empty mesh

2.) in edit mode (front view) draw the outline of the lightbulb (only one side). You can do that by holding down the CTRL key then each left click will add a vertex (and an edge). Now you have just a line made out of simple edges! (I used 16 vertices to draw the outline of the bulb)

3.) go to top view, select all vertices.
4.) use the spin tool (set it to 360 degrees and 16 elements
5.) Spin. Now you got the perfect lightbulb within a minute or so
6.) go to object mode
7.) object -> scripts -> sculptify object
8.) bake

done

step 7.) above is one of the amazing highlights in primstar Oh and just if you did not yet notice. You can Sculptify Nurbs too ! So yet another approach could be to start with a NURBS sphere, modell the lightbulb, sculptify and bake ...

have fun
Gaia

Gee, and after I redid the tutorial too...lol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgwC09BvtNk

There's the updated link.

I'm about to head into blender and see if I can reproduce what Gaia describes using spin!

Well, that was quick. Can't seem to do it. I create the empty mesh, and with it selected, I cannot go into Edit mode. Object mode is the only available mode when it's an empty mesh. What am I missing here?

Edit:

I figured it out... I was adding an Empty, not an Empty Mesh... and it works great!

Thanks for the tip Gaia, that's much better than my method, although, for non symmetrical objects like the leg in my leg lamp my method is useful, whereas for symmetrical objects like the light bulb, lamp shade, spindles, etc, your method is much faster and accurate.

Thanks again.

Maybe you have unintentionally deselected the empty mesh after creating it ?

This is how i do it:

1.) startup blender
2.) remove the default object (not necessary)
3.) add -> mesh -> Empty Mesh
4.) Go to edit mode ...

Start lathing ...

I am on Windows XP and i use bledner 2.49b

Yep, I got it, I was adding an Empty, not an Empty mesh, other than that, it came out great. I did it quickly and easily, and if I would have spent a few more minutes on it it would have been even a bit better. I just thrashed it out to see it in action. Everything else went perfectly smooth. Is it possible to sculptify other (single) objects as well?

I was messing around with the tool recently and i found that arbitrary objects won't work. But if an object's mesh is sufficiently near to what a sculptmesh should look like, the sculptify seems to work reasonably well. I tried to sculptify the default cube and that one did work somehow... But it produced rather unsatisfactory results. NURBS can be sculptified without problems. In fact NURBS 2 sculpty conversion was what i added to primstar and Domino made the sculptify tool out of it

Well with (irregular) mesh support coming soon that will be the route to go soon anyways. However, even with mesh support, i don't see sculpties going away completely as meshes will not be able to be animated whereas sculpties are. Thanks for the trick though, it works great and the results I got were much better than the other method.

The tutorial for modelling with outlines is here

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2010/01/06/modelling-with-outlines/

Have fun