Roger

Guess I'm going to have to practice more. That lock Malo did has quite an economical use of splines. I'm not sure I'll be able to approach that level for a while.

And here it is with the ends capped off. I still need to figure out a way to close off the inside of the metal strapping that goes around the top of the chest, it looks odd with that gap there.

I forgot about the PWS. Makes sense. Oh well at least I didn't waste a bunch of time fooling with it and kept modeling, I just shoved it out of the way

Why do i see splines sticking out on the side? I'm not sure what that is. It almost looks like that part of the padlock is in wireframe/shaded mode. No clue how that could have happened. Maybe a glitch from the renderer, or something like that? It looked fine when I did it before.

Ok, here is the top of the treasure chest. I may change a few things yet, but so far it is not looking too bad. Still need to model the top half of the lock or latch that will go on the top of the chest, also the end pieces of the chest need to be done. But I feel fairly happy with this so far.

I brought a rotoscope in to help me make the side pieces for the top of my treasure chest. Now that I'm done with it, how do I get rid of it? I tried right clicking and deleting, tried hitting the delete button, nothing is working so far.

More progress on the treasure chest - it has a padlock now. I need to add some iron strapping on the top and bottom edges, and some rivets on the strapping. I think I might also like to move the boards just a bit closer to each other, the gap is too large for my taste. It probably should be almost unnoticeable. Also need to make a lid for it, not quite sure how I'm going to do that, since if I try individual boards they will need to be much narrower than the existing boards, in order to approximate a curved shape better. And I'll probably need hings for the lid, and some sort of clasp that goes into the lock. Let me know what you think.

Here's the padlock with the front face closed and most of the artifacts removed:

Ok, I've closed off the face. There is some artifacting, but I think once I apply the material it will be less noticeable. I've posted a 2nd pick as well where I've fixed most of the funky looking artifacts. Let me know what you think.

That's a good idea, I think I may have figured out how to do the bevel in AM though. What I did was extrude the shape once, then extrude again and scale it inwards. I was watching some AM vid/tute the other night and saw someone do something similar, I think this will help with my beveling problems. I'll use a copy/flip/attach to get the bevel on the other side, after I close the face in. No sense duplicating effort. I'm not sure if this is the best way or textbook way to do this type of bevel, but it seems like it will work.

At one point I modeled an old-timey padlock, but now can't find it. So I'm doing another one. Problem is, I can't quite close up front of it so it is a solid surface. The part that is giving me problems is the upper-right. I thought I was going to be able to have a 4 point patch and a 5 pointer, but the 5 point patch actually has six points, so I don't know how I'm going to fix this without creating a buch of extra patches. Also, it just kind of looks odd the way it is right now. I'm not sure that the splines are laid out right. The other thing, now that I've learned about beveling, I really don't have a clue how to bevel something like this. Its fairly simple to build a bevel into something that is a simple lathe or extrude, but this is a bit more complex. Suggestions?

Ok, so I've read Homeslice's tutorial (really good btw) and have been doing some more futzing around with Sweeper - is there any way to have the Y axis parallel *except* for the end segments? Basically, I would like the endmost segments to be parallel to the X axis. Also, If I uncheck keep Y axis parallel, I get rotations of the cross sections (without specifying it) but if it is checked I don't get the rotations. That is not making a whole lot of sense to me.

Ok, I still can't seem to select individual parts of the swept object. I'll have to see if I can't get the path as close to the final shape as possible.

Well I don't know what I was doing wrong but I just deleted that bit and started over. Homeslice - PDF is really good btw.

Does a swept object appear as a just one piece to AM? I'm trying to select one of the cross sections that make it up to move it down or rotate it, but I can't. I don't get the yellow selection highlights like I normally do. I've tried Edit > Deselect all but all the CPs are still green. Any ideas what's going on?

I think I more or less figured out the basics - thank you Nancy. I'll have to check out the tutorials Homeslice posted. Anyway, here is my basic swept shape: I built in some bevels and I'm going to use this as the building block for my handle. I'm going to bend it as needed, hopefully that will work.

DOh. You're right - you even said to select the path. Guess I'll try this again...

If I go to plugins > wizards, though, I don't see Sweeper listed (which is strange because I could have sworn I saw it there before). Is there some way I could have hidden it, or maybe it is not visible in the view I'm in?

If I change the orientation of the cross section to vertical I get something a little more like what I was expecting, but one of the ends is still hosed:

I'm trying to extrude along a path but not getting anywhere. I created my path in the shape of an arc (working on a handle for my chest) and I created the cross section ( an ellipse). When I choose Plugins > Wizards > Extruder then choose the arc as the path and the ellipse as the cross section to extrude along, I am not getting the results I would expect. I get something that sort of looks like I wanted, but not quite. One end is pinched, and I was expecting the cross section to stay more or less vertical in the middle and then curve off in the opposite direction on each side, like an arch. Here are two screenshots:

This is cool. Jost, if I may ask - what procedure did you have to go through to self-publish via Kindle? It might be a way of funding my film, the book is already written I just need to clean the illustrations up and make things more or less presentable.

Its not the Ramen in and of itself that is dangerous - although a diet solely of Ramen, while it might keep you full, would leave you with severe deficiencies in nutrition. The danger with a diet heavy in Ramen is the amount of sodium in the flavor packets. Each flavor packet has about 1600mg of sodium, or like 2/3 your daily sodium intake. If you are subsisting on the stuff its bad for your kidneys and blood pressure. If you insist on using the flavor packet, try using only half. Or maybe make home made sauces to go with it. When I was broker-than-broke, I used to eat Ramen with cheap spaghetti sauce. Ramen is also good with fried egg whites (kinda like a fried rice with noodles instead of rice). Just about any citrus fruit will prevent scurvy. You would probably want to have an orange or two a week, along with a multi-vitamin (just in case). Would probably be best to supplement with whatever other cheap fresh or frozen vegetables and fruits you could find.

BTW unless you plan on paying for dialysis at some point, bulk beans and rice would be healthier for you than Ramen (you could always ditch the flavor packs, I guess). You would of course need to supplement this with appropriate vegetables to avoid scurvy. Yes, I've thought about this a lot.

I have to say unless you have a built-in fan base already, its going to be really hard to realize a fully funded Kickstarter campaign. I have had virtually no results from mine. But I don't have it in front of enough eyeballs and haven't figured out a way to drive traffic to it. If you already have some sort of online presence with a significant following then you probably would do ok. But if your webpage is getting like a couple dozen hits a month, I would not be terribly optimistic. I wish you luck but there seems to be a certain degree of randomness in what gets funded.

Yep, just got back from an image search and looks like props are wood, metal, fabric, etc. and characters are mostly clay but may also have fabric clothes. I think I like the all clay look better, I would have a heck of a time trying to mix the different materials and get it to look good.