Ok heres my 15 min lighter. It is in all reality the very first thing I have been able to make in the spline room. Thanks of course to the tutorials before :) My big problem I had with this (and where all my time went) was the textures. I made the lighter in like 3 min (it shows) but I was hoping to be able to rescue it with texturing. Here is what I did and I would like some help for next time. I made the lighter in the spline room and then subtracted a cylinder from it in the assemble room. IT then somehow converted itself to the vertex modeler..ok no problem. I then selected the handle polygons and named them handle (save polygons option) I then when into the texture room and tried to texture them. This is where my problem was. What cant I just texture some polys? I went back to the VM and detatched the poly's..still same thing...it only lets me texture all or 0. I know you can just texture some things but does it have to be a saved polymesh instead of saved polygons? I was not able to save a polymesh..how is this accomplished..it was always greyed out? Anyway this is pretty fun.....I am using these little challanges as a way to force myself to use carrara rather then nendo for a modeler so I expect to learn more each time I do one :) -brent

Hi Brent, There are a couple of issues here: 1) Use the spline modeler a little more thoroughly. The image at the left is a spline model from a simple circle. Doing it this way prevents the need to use boolean subtraction create the the shape. For the lighter's coils I'd actually create a simple cylinder and place it within the lighter 'spline' shape and shade it like it's glowing 2) It's easier to shade spline objects than a vertex object within Carrara (controling independent shaders on a single object that is). The image on the right shows how you can add specific shaders to specific areas of a spline object. You can control shape, placement etc. much more accuratly than on a vertex object. The workaround for a vertex object is to use UV Mapper. UV Mapper is an outstanding tool but adds a couple of extra steps that you don't need with simple mechanical objects like the Lighter. Hope this helps! Mark

Brent - Thanks for playing! And if there is a point to the 15 minute challenge thing, it's to learn. So, Mark; thanks for teaching! BTW, the lighter looks very cool. Nice shape to it. - Chip

I have a lot to learn about how the shaders work. My big problem appears to be I was using flat mapping and I had to choose a face. I see now that It was dumb not to use cyclinder mapping...oh well theres always next time :)