Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

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clintonman
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Re: Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

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firstScope.jpg
Got the plugin working. Here's the first result. Before the scope was made I copied the NURBS pieces and manually mirrored by setting x size to negative of the original value. I also created the rubber lip with the birail tool. It's a bit lumpy now because I tried to make a correction and messed it up. I used the NURBS info tool to get the 2 halves of the patches lined up in a way so the weld NURBS patch could be used to attach them together. The cap tool was used to create the flat front surface.
firstRevolve.jpg
firstRevolveOptions.jpg
I created the profile for the curve using the workspace NURBS tools. The profile was import to modelspace and the pivot was placed at the lens center. The new plugin was run with the "use pivot for center" option to revolve/lathe it. The first result was scary and melted looking, but I found the patch options and changed the display resolution.
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Re: Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

Post by MikomDude »

We Are Borg

Hehe, good job though! =)
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Re: Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

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MikomDude wrote:We Are Borg

Hehe, good job though! =)
That made me laugh :lol: and thank you.
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Re: Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

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mountingBrackets1.jpg
mountingBrackets2.jpg
mountingBrackets3.jpg
Copied the scope and created a third scope using the same method. I created the mounting brackets by creating 3 circles and some lines. I found that I couldn't draw the curves in the front view so I created some cones, centered them on the scopes, grouped them and rotated them to the ground plane to be used as reference. The internal lines were removed by opening the curves and removing points. The curves were all joined together using the weld curve plugin. The plugin has a bug since it crashes truespace when I tell it to delete the original curves. It's a consistent crash on the curves in this scene so I should be able to fix it. Next I used the nurbs cage plugin to make smaller versions of the curve copied them and then skinned them all together. The last step was capping the holes to make it solid.
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Re: Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

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Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell......


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Re: Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

Post by MikomDude »

DarkScythe wrote:Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell......


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Haha, yes indeed, that does come to mind =)
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Re: Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

Post by froo »

Clinton,
Is this a workspace plugin? Or a Modelspace plugin? I'm confused. Either way great job! :bananathumb:
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Re: Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

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froo wrote:Clinton,
Is this a workspace plugin? Or a Modelspace plugin? I'm confused. Either way great job! :bananathumb:
Thanks, you might say it's a combination. I've been using the workspace scripts to create a lot of the basic curves used and I created the modelspace plugin "revolve curve" so I could do some lathe type process without getting a polygon model result. I also used the nurbs cage modelside plugin to shape the nurbs patches and the modelspace plugins to weld curves and patches together.
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Re: Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

Post by clintonman »

batteryCompartment.jpg
batteryCompartmentWF.jpg
These images show the battery compartment/hinge of the goggles. I started out as a nurbs cylinder and curves were extracted from the cylinder and copied to each change of direction of the surface.
batteryCompartmentBulbos.jpg
batteryCompartmentBulbos.jpg (13.69 KiB) Viewed 4732 times
At first I tried skinning all the curves together at once but it got all soft looking. It didn't have any hard edges. Next I tried skinning each section separately one at a time and the result was a razor sharp edge. I tried doing 2 closely spaced isolines but it was too difficult to control it. I think I tried a couple of other things that didn't work out. Finally, I got the control I needed by following a few steps. I'll tell the story in the next post since I've reached my 3 image limit for this post. One more thing I did was to manually create a fillet where the scopes plug in to the main piece. I created a curve with a quarter circle profile, extracted a curve from the scope cross section and lofted the curve along it. It worked surprisingly well.
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Re: Night Vision Goggles - NURBS

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batteryCompartmentSkinned.jpg
This shows the different skins that were created to give the basic shape. Each color is a different patch created by skinning a series of circles that where extracted from the cylinder and then copied to create the shapes. The orange section is the original cylinder patch. My goal was to get well defined edges without them being razor sharp. These are the steps that worked for me working through each patch orange to yellow to green etc:
1. Added an isocurve to the orange patch near the border with the yellow patch. This was so geometry was in place to give some rounding later
2. Use the stitch tool to join the orange to the yellow patch, this gives some rounding at the edge, but it still needs some work
3. Unglued/ungrouped the result to prepare for welding- not sure if this step was really needed
4. used the weld patch plugin to join the orange and yellow sections together
5. Adjust the same isocurve that was added earlier to fine tune the smoothing along the edge.

A lot of steps but it worked for me. If modelspace had a edge loop select like workspace it would have been easier to use the nurbs cage plugin to control the shape the edges. Oh, I forgot to mention I scaled the battery compartment way up in size while working on it. This made it easier to model since even a small change can change the look of a nurbs patch and the small size was making things jump too much as if grid snapping was on.

Someone mentioned Splinter Cell. After looking at that picture I'm sure the instructor must have been influenced by it. In another section of videos a gun is modeled, a pistol with a big silencer on it. :)
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