I have not failed a thousand times to recreate the satellite dish from tc_hydro

randomteddy

L1: Registered
Jun 5, 2009
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....I've just found a thousand ways not to do it. The I'm trying to replicate the dish from tc_hydro. So I look in the sdk version and to my surprise it was made with displacements. I knew that it had to be subdivided because there honestly no way you could get something like that perfectly round by painting it. But for some reason I can't get the outside of the dish to have an edge. does anyone have any idea how to make that shape?
 

Penguin

Clinically Diagnosed with Small Mapper's Syndrome
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May 21, 2009
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hahah funny joke Martin but we all know that will crash hammer.
 

Seba

DR. BIG FUCKER, PHD
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Jun 9, 2009
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Martijn's either a troll or trying to make an unfunny joke. Don't listen to him.

AFAIK, the dish was made with a 360-degree arch with a small hole left in the middle to make sure every brush has a four-sided face. The top faces were then subdivided, and the ground around it was sewn together (if you open the sdk_tc_hydro file, you'll see that the ground has weird non-rectangular shapes; that is to ensure it'll sew with the dish).
 
Feb 18, 2009
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It's quite simple (but rather labourious). I assume you can see how the actual bowl is made (with simple sloped brushes subdivided). The only way I know is to look in top view, measure how far across and up/down each vertex has to go, and moving each vertex the corresponding amounts in x and y direction. Hope that helps.
 

randomteddy

L1: Registered
Jun 5, 2009
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Screenshots as per request.
capturewb.jpg


As you can see the dish has an edge that runs along the Green line. The verts that are on the Blue line are perfectly collinear, but on the Red line the verts follow a parabolic path.

capture6h.jpg


And this is my dish's edge, as you can see the Red line is smoothed and I don't want that.


capture4h.jpg


And this is hydo's dish with its displacement destroyed.

Edit:

It's quite simple (but rather labourious). I assume you can see how the actual bowl is made (with simple sloped brushes subdivided). The only way I know is to look in top view, measure how far across and up/down each vertex has to go, and moving each vertex the corresponding amounts in x and y direction. Hope that helps.

Or just steal hydro's dish, which really isn't an option seeing as I need to resize it and change the exits around.
 
Last edited:

A Boojum Snark

Toraipoddodezain Mazahabado
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Nov 2, 2007
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Ah, subdivision magic. I've learned much about it with my work on Moonballs. A lot of it is done through use of extra displacements that get removed after you're done. The trick is often that if you have displacements exactly the same length along a given axis on either side of the one you want to keep, it will only be affected in the other axes.

hydrodish1.png


After subdivide:

hydrodish2.png


Then you remove the helpers, or as I do, put them in a visgroup and have them textured in skip, so you can get them back if you have to re-sub something.

That's not exactly like the hydro ring, but should get you pointed in the right direction. Do something similar with helpers sticking up off the edges of the bowl that match the uppermost pieces of the bowl, and then you can subdiv that edge to sharp circle that matches with the outside ring.
 

randomteddy

L1: Registered
Jun 5, 2009
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Thanks for the help snark.