Howdy, folks. Since a friend first linked me to Renderosity, I've been watching the Carrara boards. I even based my decision to go through the fight to get the upgrade by the images posted here. I'm still fairly new to Carrara and am looking for some help on textures. Specifically, textures as applied to a boolean opbject. The attached image here consists of three objects. The eraser and pencil body are both booleans while the eraser holder is a simple spline. As you can see, I had no problem creating a layer list that allowed for various areas on the holder to be different colors. However, the boolean pencil body has been nothing but trouble. No matter how I set up my layers, I can't seem to get a setup similar to the holder. I want a wooden end with the yellow pencil, maybe even a black lead on the end. But, I also want that shape/look that says this was sharpened in a sharpener (see how the octagon is curved at the change in shapes). Can any of you give me some ideas on how to either rebuild the pencil body to hold the textures I want or just put the textures on there?

Just for fun, you could duplicate the pencil body, shrink it to 99.9%, move it forward just a little bit and apply your wood texture to it. Then do the same thing but re-boolean with a hollow cylynder leaving you just a narrow cylinder with the pointy ended lead. That should provide you the pencil lead when you retexture it. You may end up with visible edges and you may not. I don't know anything about UVMapping but from what I undertand, cutcopypaste is probably correct for a truly pure result.

Well, I took cutcopypaste's suggestion to start. Here's what I have. I'm not happy with the fact that UVMapper (.25e beta) keeps telling me that the UV info coming from Carrara is invalid, nor am I happy with the way Carrara handles importing its own OBJ files, even before I have UVMapper resave it with the new map orientation. Notice how the lines aren't as sharp anymore? And the color is off. I can't get the wood and grain to look right without sacrificing the black of the pencil lead. Kixum's idea reminds me of Bryce and that may be an easier, albeit more costly, solution. I'll let you know how it turns out. Thanks for the suggestions.

Modeled this in Amapi in about 10 minutes and brought into Carrara for rendering. This could easily been made in Carrara but Amapi can break a booleaned object into pieces so texturing is a no brainer.

Don't tell anyone, but Amapi makes me feel like I have rocks in my head. Are there any good tutorials you can point me at to learn that program? Carrara is at least similar enough to Ray Dream 3D that I could figure out the basics pretty quick.

Try http://www.eovia.com/amapi/tutorials/mar2000tut/english/default.htm

alexabel has a good approach, that can be done very easily within the spline modeler in Carrara. Just make cross sections where the shapes change, make three duplicates & then delete cross sections from each duplicate as needed to build the 3 parts. The other alternative is to use the elevation with wiggle feature in the blender of the shader.

The problem I had with making the whole pencil body in the spline modeler was the curves where the cone intersects the hex barrel. If I use the splie modeler, I'm stuck with a less realistic look of a sharpened pencil--at least to my eyes. I want those curves of yellow to match the shape of the model. If I can keep my computer from freezing up, I will try the Amapi approach this evening.

Good job alexabel! I need to learn Amapi pretty hard. Very cool that you did that. Since you say it would be easy in C, it might be nice to do it and then post the solution. -Kix

Attached Link: http://creafab.free.fr

I often use RDS and Amapi. Some tutorials are on my web site, but thy are in french. CREAFab, la crtion numique autrement...

Thanks, fabien_nguyen. It'll take me a while to figure out what it all says (my last french class was more than 12 years ago!), but the Amapi tutorial looks liek I may learn alot from it. BTW, you have several broken image links as viewed from Netscape 4.78.

Attached Link: http://creafab.free.fr

Thanks. If you ever need a translation of some part of my tutorials, just ask me ! Thanks for the warning about the broken links. It's strange because I had checked all the links with Netscape 4.7 and 6.1. I'll try to fix that. CREAFab, la crtion numique autrement... creafab@free.fr