Exercise 11.5

[flashawd]

Hi - I am running through exercise 11.5 - the face. I am having trouble w/ the 5 point spline where the eye and the nose meet. I have the 5 control points set up but when selecting the 5 cp's the "5 point spline button" doesn't activate. So I try a few more times and about the 5 time of selecting the 5 cp the button becomes active to where I can press it and it creates the 5 point patch. Is there a certain order you have to select the cp for it to activate - not sure what I am doing wrong.

 

Thanks - Eric

[Caroline]

Hi, Eric - 5 point patches can be a bit odd sometimes.

 

One of the tricks is to select your 5 points, and if the button does not activate, press the "." (period) key, then press it again. The "." key inverts the selection, so when you invert it back again, the button should be activated.

 

On the rare occasions when that does not work, I have found hiding all but the few patches around the 5 points, and using the Lasso selection tool (Shift G) to select the 5 points works.

[flashawd]

Hi Caroline, thank you for the quick response - I think you answered the question before I posted it. ;-)

 

I tried what you mentioned and it still isn't activating the button. I had a version 11 from a couple of years back and upgraded to version 13 recently. I haven't played around w/ the program for a couple of years and wanted to jump back in it, so I was going through the tutorials - I don't remember having this problem w/ v11.

 

I have moved each control point to make sure there were only 5 and there were, rebooted the computer and program - so not sure what the deal is. Anyway, thanks again so much for your reply - Eric

[Paul Forwood]

Try drag selecting the CPs rather than just clicking on them. That may require hiding some geometry first but it usually works for me.

 

If it still fails you probably have added a CP that is sitting very close to another one and is not easily visible when selecting.

 

Zoom in and click-drag the individual CPs until you find the rogue CP.

[flashawd]

Alright - got it. All I did was break several of the lines and reattached them - and it worked - there must have been something the program didn't like the way it was going. I'll just do that if I have the problem again. Anyway - thank you much.

[Muff]

Sometimes 5-points can be stubborn to activate the button? Sometimes. When they are, I personally do it manually like this: Hold down the Shift key(pc) and select both sides of EACH of the splines, that makes up a 5-point. Go clockwise/Counter clockwise, or in a random order, clicking EACH SECTION of spline that intersects into the control points within a 5-point. Its just one of those things that occurs, especially when you have two 5-point patches right next to each other.

[flashawd]

Thanks Muff ;-)

[largento]

I got this trick from Barry's tutorials:

 

Select the 5 CPs, hit the hide button, so that now you only have those 5 CPs. Now drag select all 5 of them and the 5-point button should activate. There does seem to be instances where having hooks on nearby patches can interfere with it.

[Logrus]

Sometimes having the control point at the wrong angle wont allow the icon to appear. You can be looking at a smooth nice 5 point patch, but when you rotate the image, you might notice a control point is actually inside the model..

[phatso]

I have a lot of problems with 5-point patches. 2 questions:

 

1. This is prolly something mathematical, which means maybe Martin could list some "dos" and "dont's" of 5-point patching? In addition to what's in the manual, which doesn't really address this?

 

2. Does this problem still exist in V14?

 

Maybe the answer to question 2 would render question 1 moot...

[flashawd]

Largento - worked perfect thank you, and everyone else for posting.