Sculptie only possible from Nurbs sphere?

What I don't seem to understand after days of trying and searching is how I can combine several Nurbs surfaces into one object. For instance the side piece or arm rest from a couch (see attached pic).

I start with a cv curve. I close the curve and copy it several times. Then I loft it. Now I have a surface in the shape of the couch side piece, but front and end are open. So I use Planar on the front and back curves to close them. But now I have three seperate surfaces instead of one. Attaching doesn't work, they remain 3 different surfaces and produce 3 seperate rgb textures.

I can get the result I want by just using a Nurbs sphere and changing the vertices. But is that the way to go or can I combine several surfaces somehow as one Nurbs object?

Other thing I tried is modelling with polygons and converting them to Nurbs (via sub-d). But then also I get seperate surfaces. Same happens when I use a Nurbs cube, which has 6 surfaces.

Please help me out here, because these simple and specific things cannot be found in tuts. What would be the best way to model this couch side piece and prepare it for a sculptie?

Here's what I would do. After the loft step:

* Select all the vertices that make up one of the open faces
* Extrude them
* Scale them down to a near point
* Move that point so it's on the plane where the closed surface would have been. This gives you a 'pole', and 'closes' the surface, but you still basically have only one surface. Then do the same for the other side. Here's a good tutorial that explains the concept:

http://www.bentha.net/sculpted-tuto/build-sphere-and-map-uvs.html

I don't know if you can do that in a NURBS-only tool, but you can export/import into a tool that deals with meshes, and then do this at the mesh level. Hope that made sense... I'm very much a noob when it comes to any kind of 3D modeling, but I've been reading a lot of sculpty tutorials lately

That's the way to go. Sculpties have to be one contiguous surface, meaning they should start from spheres.


If you delete the construction history after attaching the surfaces, they will become one. Select both surfaces and then go Edit -> Delete By Type -> History. However, that still doesn't mean they'll be suitable for sculpties. Throretcally, they might be usable or they might not be, depending on how they were made. You need to make sure the object reads as as spherical. In other words there must be two distinct poles, and that all the longitudinal isoparms must flow from them. For the surface in your picture, it doesn't look like that will end up being the case.

For best results, just start with a sphere, and reshape it into your desired object. Note that sharp edges like the ones you've got in your picture won't always be possible. In fact, it's probably best not to try for them since they'll likely get killed by LOD over distance anyway.


Edit: For what you're trying to do, I'd recommend a shape kind of like this:



I made this in all of 10 seconds, so you'll probably want to do it a little more carefully than I did, and with greater detail, but I think you get the idea. It's a simple sphere with the CV's moved around.

Oh boy Chosen!!! You are always so helpful around here, and I have had so much help from your postings in the past. But with this reply you have made me really very very happy!

I was thinking: it simply CAN'T be so obvious, and I was breaking my head last few weeks to read and learn as much as I could. I am glad I did, because now I know many of the basics, but I am even more glad that I finally know the way to go, where to start.

Thanks a million for your kind reply and for the trouble you took to explain it even with a pic. Oh boy, I wish the update was already here. I can't keep all my ideas any longer in my head LOL!!!

How are people creating filleted cubes and turning them into sculpted prims?

It's still just a single surface patch, so it can made into a sculpted surface map.