Maya

modeling

Problem with birail 1 Tool and loft command

For the project, when you say you have to use the curves, do you have to use the curves provided? do you create your own curves? Does the model need to be one complete peice? can it be separate peices. can you create separate peices and join them together afterwards?

For the walls/roof of the house you could duplicate one of the curves and use it as the first and last curve you select for the loft. in this case, dont select the curves for the floor. the just use a planer for the floor.

getting the floor to be part of the surfice in one go would be trickier if that is necassery for whatever reason.

when working with nurbes, imagine a strechy sheet of paper that you fold  and bend along the curves to create a 3d Shape. there have to be four sides to the sheet (though you can pinch two corners to gether to create a triangle shape)

That sounds like a cool project, I would be interested in seeing the result when you are finished.

Glad I could help

Actually there is a third option. thats to loft upwards. This may be conceptually simpler to think in the outline case. Its also easier to animate at a later date.

Because the data is orthogonal to the most likely direction of animation, and there is less data. More importantly its way easeir to generate.

Heres a few computer created topologies of the base shape (i allowed for slant for a second where i took the one for demo set) , remeber one can do a lot of extension* on this with chimneys seconf floors outhouses, flat roofs onesided slants different slants heights, sections that dot reach the rooflevel etc. higher buildings make sense with H shaped topologies for instance, or might have different morphological needs. But here im only generating one surface, one simple piece.

• so topologyother than just the layout graph and 2 different ends. Add to this data on the shape of the land and youll get a lot of variations with 3 or 4 rules.

Loft (pun intended) MEL (paste into script editor and hit ctrl+enter)

file -f -new;
curve -d 1 
      -p 0 2 3 -p 0 2 0 -p 2 2 0 -p 2 2 0 
      -p 0 2 0 -p 0 2 -2 -p 0 2 -2 -p 0 2 3 
      -k 0 -k 3 -k 5 -k 5 -k 7 -k 9 -k 9 
      -k 14 ;
closeCurve -ch 0 -ps 1 -rpo 1  "curve1";
curve -d 1 
      -p 1 1 3 -p 1 1 1 -p 2 1 1 -p 2 1 -1 
      -p 1 1 -1 -p 1 1 -2 -p -1 1 -2 -p -1 1 3 
      -k 0 -k 3 -k 5 -k 5 -k 7 -k 9 -k 9 
       -k 14 ;
closeCurve -ch 0 -ps 1 -rpo 1 "curve2";
curve -d 1 
      -p 1 0 3 -p 1 0 1 -p 2 0 1 -p 2 0 -1 
      -p 1 0 -1 -p 1 0 -2 -p -1 0 -2 -p -1 0 3 
      -k 0 -k 3 -k 5 -k 5 -k 7 -k 9 -k 9 
      -k 14 ;
closeCurve -ch 0 -ps 1 -rpo 1 "curve3";
loft -d 1 curve1 curve2 curve3;