Two Questions Before Purchase

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omac12
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Joined: Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:28 am

Two Questions Before Purchase

Post by omac12 »

Hello, I have a couple of questions before purchase. I am interested mostly in inflate - adding grayscale pictures and making them 3d for export. I downloaded the demo, but I cannot test that function. My question is can I take several inflated pictures and merge them together- say 2 separate views combined into one and merge will take care of the intersections so that I wouldn't have the objects on the inside? To make it clearer- if I inflate a cube and a sphere and push them together so that the cube is intersecting the sphere, when I merge will the part of the cube that is inside the sphere go away to get a real union? If I were to look at it in wireframe would there be anything inside the sphere?

The second question is, "is there a help file in pdf or chm that is provided with the paid version or are the online links pointed to in the demo version what help is provided?

Thank you for reading this.

I will take a harder look at the demo to make sure that I'm not just missing the import picture and inflate function. I read the forum and checked the model menu, but it pointed to the upgrade page so I thought I would ask about this.
Simon
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Post by Simon »

Merge will work as you describe (there won't be any messy wireframe inside the new object). However bear in mind that it is a voxel merge, rather than a geometric boolean, so the results can get a bit fuzzy and organic. It's much more useful for organics than engineering.

The only help is online for the moment. There have been PDFs in the past made by other artists, but the online help is the main starting point followed by the tutorials in this forum and elsewhere.

I'll have to add inflate and import picture to demo one day...
omac12
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Joined: Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:28 am

Post by omac12 »

Thank you for your reply. Initially I am working on space vehicles that have rather defined lines. So you don't think I could get satisfactory results with that sort of task? I tested a simple distorted sort of shape that I created with Curvy and got very acceptable results. If the merge produced comparable results that would be fine. I have a license for another program that uses voxels. I wonder if that program could retopologize the Curvy 3D output? I'm sure it could. I'm ashamed to say that I haven't really learned it enough yet to answer that question though.

Thank you again for your assistance,

Al
Simon
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Post by Simon »

One way to do it is to smooth the merged result and then put the small details in separate objects or texture maps. Should work fine for small-screen spaceships, but wouldn't manage a death-star as it has too many sharp edges.

Curvy is great for mixing up in different 3D programs - that route would work well for retopo I think.
omac12
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Joined: Mon Jan 03, 2011 11:28 am

Post by omac12 »

Thank you for your assistance. I'm hard at work learning it right now.
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