Hi Guy's I'm trying to do the tutorial "drawing a sweep path in 3d" on page 168 of the Carrara 2 manual. All is fine when I take my pipe out in the Y axis. It's fine when I take it down in the Z axis but as soon as I try to take it accross in the X axis my pipe squashes and distort's. What's happening? I've seemingly tried everything but nothing work's. My extrusion method is on "pipeline" and I've tried both "filling" and "unfilling" cross section end's. Can anyone help? Thanks People.

Looking at your spline object, I see there are two points on the pipeline occupying the same coordinates. If you make a spline object with no overlapping points, free envelope, it should have a nice cross-section. But when I import a wavefront.obj exported from Poser as vertex object, then try to save the Carrara file with the vertex object, it says "unknown error" and fails to save. Mac OS X.2.6, C2. And the progress bar pops up a few minutes later, saying 90% saved, where it stays indefinitely. Importing a Poser obj as facet meshes is not sufficient for several operations, and it crashes when trying to convert facet meshes to a vertex object.

Hey Mateo, Thanks for the response. I'll now look into that!

I tried the above shape and got the same problems/results. I also tried using a free envelope (and all the others), but, that didn't work either. You should not have to use any extrusion envelope at all on this spline object anyway. I think you found a bug. If you find a way to make the shape work properly please share. My bet is that a free extrusion envelope will not work for you either. Good luck in finding the answer. I hope it works for you.

Yes, I found that the envelope didn't make any difference when there are two points on the extrusion path occupying the same coordinates. But when all the points are discreet, the pipeline is reasonably unsquashed and the free envelope allows tweaking of the shape to make it even less squashed.

I found that to be the case also. Though there still is much left to be desired of the outcome. I think the spline modeler should be doing this much better. I for one call it a BUG.

I found the same problem in C3 and I haven't modeled this kind of object in a while, but it used to work very well in RayDream.

I think the problem is that the program rotates cross-sections' drawing planes around the cross-section centers. As you can see in the picture the plane is perfectly diagonal in the corner but its grid is rotated. The grid should be perpendicular to the imaginary plane of the lines around the corner or one should be able to rotate it. Then one could calculate the change in the form by hand. For example in a corner of 90 degrees the cross-section is in a 45 degrees' angle to the paths' sections and its width or height(whichever changes) would be divided by the sine of 45 degrees (The value is bigger than the original). I managed fix some of the corners in this pipe I created with a cross-section in every corner by doing the corners the way I explained( with dividing by the sine of 45 degrees). In the other corners the grid was rotated and changing the width and height values would have only deformed the pipe in wrong directions. I also tried to set the values first and then rotating the shape but it is hard to get it right that way too. Anyway one shouldn' have to do this kind of shapes by hand. Hope this helps you even a bit.

Well thank's all you people. It would certainly seem as though it's a BUG. I'm very dissapointed to hear that it affect's version 3 also as I have just ordered this and am at this moment awaiting it's arrival. I can't believe that someone at Eovia hasn't noticed this yet, don't these company's check and work through their manual's before they put them out? What makes this situation even worse is that I'm a 2d artist very new to 3d and this sort of thing just makes a daunting task (ie.learning 3d) even harder than it allready is! Anyway, thank's again for your trouble all of you! Roy Summers UK