Is there anyway to model seperate shapes in the spline room as one object. More specifically I want to create a bunch of dart like objects to use as a school of fish. If I have to create them seperately my file starts to get unbelievably large.If this post seems unclear, forgive me I'm at work trying to type and answer customer questions all at once. Stacey

That can be done by useing many cross sections and several "ovals" but it is rather tedious. You need to add the ovals to each cross-section then edit the shape of each one & delete the extrusion from areas not wanted. You'll start with perhaps 12 "tubes", add 3 cross sections for each in different areas, edit each section & delete ovals not needed.

The inherint(is that right) problem is that they if I use this solutions then all the objects end up in a straight line. I know I could do this with RDS and might have to reload it I would think there would be a way to do it with Cararra. I know that with RDS there is sea anenome tutorial which I would also like to see if it could be done in Carrara. I guess I'll just have crack open the manuel when I get home.

Wait I see what you mean I had to think about it a second and that might just work. Thanks

If you'll pardon the cheesy looking fish here's another way that it can be done. Mark

Hey Mark the Particle generator looks exaclty like what I'm looking for. Do you think you can give a quick how to on it?

Pardon the fast and sloppy work but hopefully it will illustrate the point! Gotta go see my ten year old sing while dressed up like a 50's thug at school :) 1. Go to the render room and activate 'Light through transparency' or else this effect will crash and burn. 2. The quality of your fish depend on how much time you spend on the silouette and texture maps. Since obviously these fish are as flat as a piece of paper you'll need to artificially shadow their roundness with the texture. 3. Select the partical emitter of your choice. Then, in the assembly room in the properties tray, select 'rectangular' for the shape of the particles. 4. Apply and fuss around with the elements in the Shader Room until it looks right. As you can see in the image above, I had to rotate and flip the texture maps to work for this image. 5. Have fun. Leaves on trees, forests, falling money etc. can be created quickly this way. Mark

Way cool Mark, havn't goofed around with that particle generator at all. Stacey, the problem of the "straight line" on either of the spline model solutions (cross section extrusions or profile solution) can be resolved by applying a wave, bend and/or twist deformer to the model in the properties dialog.

thanks for both of your feedbacks. Now time to play around and see what I can do. Stace

I just realized that I left out a step for the emitter. You have to advance the timeline since the particle emissions are a function of quantity over time. Just move the time line slider around (scrubbing) until you find something that looks good. Mark