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Old 3rd December 2010, 12:12 PM   #1
James
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Join Date: Apr 2004
Location: Boston
Posts: 16
Unhappy problems manipulating a subdivided object within its conformer-box

Hello ;

While playing with my new discovery about subdivided objects within the 'Moliate Box' (i'm sure you guys have another name for this thing), in order to learn how to use it better, I'm encountering some problems and questions I could really use some help with:

1) After making a curvilinear frame structure using conventional boxes and other shapes. I needed to make a subdivided polygonal shape roughly in the shape of an egg that is supposed to hang suspended within that frame without touching it. I made a box, used the tools>object editor to subdivide it. (to 3), I proceded to smoothly shape it to fit gracefully inside the complex frame in a shape that did not touch the frame following a proportionally graceful way. Due to the number of vertices of the 'egg', the natural tool to use was the manipulating box of the object editor subdivide function that would squash/stretch the egg smoothly into shape.
-----first of all, although the subdivided object inside its box is visible in the 3d window, it is sometimes visible in the ortho windows, and sometimes not, which although seems completely arbitrary to me, I am sure I must be missing some way of controlling whether I can see it or not (I would like to see both object and its containment box in all four windows. How is this view option controlled? or is it a bug I cannot fix?

2) When I started doing this on today's model, as soon as I resized the containment box either all at once, or with vertices, (I'm talking within one or two moves), the target 'egg' object inside completely disappeared from all windows and i was left with the conforming box, which was useless. I saved and reloaded the autocad program and this seemed to go away. Still, it worries me that it happened in the first place.

Playing with the 'Set Surface Type' options went nowhere and I was just left with a box on all four views. Useless. What i need is to see the contained object and its reshaper box on all four windows. What settings do I need to keep on in order to achieve this?

3) I needed to make 2 of these subdivided egg shapes for the model (an alien caravan wagon), one of which was only a silk canopy over the driver and was set to a semi-transparent surface material and was only supposed to hang over the cargo bundle (that oblong egg shape that hung on bungees within the frame) and thus only overlap/intersect its shape on a rather small part. Since I was hiding the pre-made bundle shape before working on the canopy shape, the cargo shape was hidden. When I unhided all shapes, the canopy shape 'ate' the cargo shape where it intersected, and the fore-part of the cargo shape was completely invisible, even though the canopy shape was set to a high transparency and you could easily see the frame and wheels through it. only when I hid the canopy shape did the full cargo shape become visible again. What's going on there?

4) Finally: I need to be able to access the actual vertices of the subdivided object inside its box once the box's conforming work is done, and of course I can't. It's like the box (with only four vertices) is the only channel to communicate with its 'prisoner' shape. Is there a way to discard the box once its work is over and get to work on the shape I made inside (making finer adjustments to the vertices, removing surfaces as windows, etc). for example: while making the canopy shape, I was only keeping my eye on the forequarter of it and intended to discard the back part, leaving a curved canopy that was attached only where it touched the chassis-frame. Since I can't seem to get my hands on its vertices/surfaces, Im left with a big, useless potato shape that overhangs the entire vehicle. I was learning how to use the subdivide object tool in order to have a better/easier way of making curved, covex shapes like that (armor, sails, canopies, etc. ) which I used to have to make using portions of resized spheres and reshaping it vertex by vertex. Is there a function to discard the box conform and access my inner subdivided shape once I've made it? How do I do that?


Also, I did not upgrade to your current autocad because of basically one little, but extremely crucial change it featured from my older version (5): When I have an object selected which i want to manipulate and it's contained deep within a big, complicated object and hidden by obstructions or symmetrical objects etc. I used to just switch to Vertex view which would give me a dot outline I could see and work with through all the obscuring stuff. Seeing it in the 3d window while it was isolated was not enough, as I mostly have to manipulate it in the Ortho views. This feature was gone and the Vertexes were no longer visible through obstructing objects. I have no idea why that would be changed and that alone had to keep me from upgrading to the newer version which I was growing used to during the trial period. Is this going to be fixed anytime soon?

Thank you for any help anyone can provide

Please send the body of responses to proteus19m@yahoo.com if you would be so kind.
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