Alternatives to rounder?

[Ifandbut]

Hi everyone. I'm just starting to get back to useing LW after a long break. I got a semi complex shape that I want to round the cornors on but after spending 3+hrs useing every trick I know to try to get rounder to work on my shape and I'm out of ideas.

So, what can I use to achive a rounding effect on my cornors without going insane trying to get rounder to work?

Thanks,
Ifandbut

P.S. I'm useing LW 9.2

[Woody]

SubD and freeze would work to smooth everything out.
If you post a screengrab of the object we may be able to help with the rounder issue...

[Ifandbut]

http://www.foundation3d.com/uploads/instruction/2008/03/272-23-322640_tn.jpg (http://www.foundation3d.com/uploads/instruction/2008/03/272-23-322640.jpg)
There is a grab of the object I'm trying to round. I mainly want to round that flat cornor smooth right now and eventaly tround the entire object. Right now the object has n-gons but I'v also tried to tripple it with no sucess.

I think tommrow I'll attempt to reconstruct the object from scrach. At first I did not know exactly how the geometory would look like so I might be able to make a cleaner mesh from scrach.

[Bells of Freedom]

Maybe you've already tried this, but can you just select two or three points, run Rounder, then select two more points, Rounder, etc.?
I've found that I've run into less problems when I just round vertices rather than polys.

If the ngons are a problem, knife the selected ngons, weld points to get tri's or quads, and try Rounder on the vertices again.

[Tony Gardner]

BoF is right, Rounder is much less of a pain in the **** if you only let it loose on a portion of your geometry at once.

Try selecting just the polys you want rounded, or the edges, or just the points and fire up rounder.

If that fails I used to use a plugin called KW Edgesmoother which was quite good, it had a max poly limit built in (in the free version only) but that shouldn't be a problem with doing parts of your geometry.

http://www.mmm.ne.jp/~waken/edgesm/index_e.html

[JeffrySG]

Have you watched this video tutorial on rounder? I know it cleared up a few things for me the first time I saw it.

http://www.stevewarner.com/Freeview/01/

[Rigel]

I wish I had seen that video before I started building the Universal Joint. I'll probably have to go back and rebuild most of the hull to eliminate the Rounder errors, now that I know how to get Rounder to behave itself. Thanks for the link JeffrySG.

[JeffrySG]

^no problem Rigel! Glad it helped!

[Bells of Freedom]

Have you watched this video tutorial on rounder? I know it cleared up a few things for me the first time I saw it.

http://www.stevewarner.com/Freeview/01/

Yes, thank you, JeffreySG, for posting this. Steve Warner has a great site with other tutorials I'm going to check out. :tu:

[Ifandbut]

That movie helped alot. Got me starting to think of rounder on edges rather then polys. I still could not round my orgional object but now that I know what rounder expects I can reconstruct the object so rounder will work.

Thanks

[Mr. Wilde]

What exactly are you trying to do? Something like this?

http://www.foundation3d.com/uploads/instruction/2008/03/80-25-460842_tn.jpg (http://www.foundation3d.com/uploads/instruction/2008/03/80-25-460842.jpg) http://www.foundation3d.com/uploads/instruction/2008/03/80-25-460685_tn.jpg (http://www.foundation3d.com/uploads/instruction/2008/03/80-25-460685.jpg)

[Ifandbut]

Yes Wilde, that's basicaly what I wanted to do. I also wanted to round the inside cornors. I was able to get my redone version by stencling in the vertical suport smaller then the cornor, for some reason rounder refused to round the 90 degree angle between the horzitional and vertical structure.

I was also hopeing to get a more rounded edge from that triangle. I'm going have to figure out a different way to do that also.

[Belistner]

Have you watched this video tutorial on rounder? I know it cleared up a few things for me the first time I saw it.

http://www.stevewarner.com/Freeview/01/

Thanks for that. I've struggled a lot with rounder and never been able to get it to do anything significant.

Lewis

[Artificial Imagination]

Not to hijack the thread but...Aside from KwEdgesmoother, is there an alternative program out there besides rounder?

The problem I have is that the version of Lightwave I have is 7, and I only have it because a friend of mine installed it for me but he moved so I don't have a liscence for it to update it and version 7 didn't come with rounder, KWE is nice but limited, is there anything out there that would work with version 7 that i could download? Rounder would be nice but I can't find it to download it.

[Positron]

the last trick on that video changed my life! lol

I got a ship Im building and that trick would of come in handy so many times.

[TSpyrison]

That video helps alot..

But I do wish they would "fix" rounder so that it would work based off of actual edge selection rather than points..

Or give the options for edge, point, polygon selection...