Custom Circular Rail

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I have a very elaborate rail that I made using slabs and saved it as an object. I want it to follow a circular pattern. Is it possible for me to give the railing a radius?

I'm not too familiar with GDL, but I will definitely be willing to give it a try to work this one out, my rendering is due in two days.

I know it can be done, just need some help.

Thanks.

[Vitruvius]

Hi Richard,

Any chance of posting a 1,2,3 about how you achieved that? The results speak for themselves, and thanks, but I'd really like your tutorial in taking the thing from xy plane to round!!

Cheers,

[Richard Morrison]

Here's a copy of a PM to muddasick-

Okay, I'm no expert, but I'll tell you what I did. You need to create a new material - let's say called "Railing" and apply the alpha channel TIF image to it. (This is under the "Texture" drop down) You'll probably want to use Internal Engine for preview so you can check off the Alpha Channel Effects. You can play around with width/height of texture, but you'll probably want to have a height of 3' or so, so you'll only get one band high, and "keep orginal proportion". That's pretty much it.

I applied this material to a wall on one face, and made the other faces glass. (You'll want full transparency etc. for this glass material so it shows as little as possible). Only one face is used so you don't get two layers of the image.

You can use Lightworks rendering engine, too, and the intricate shadows will show up beautifully. (In the material setup, for Lightworks, there is a "Match Internal Engine" setting that makes things simpler). You will have to actually render to get the transparency of the railing to show. Play around with it, but it WILL work.

Hope that helps --

I haven't done a whole lot of this and I'm sure there are others who can explain the whole alpha channel thing better than I can. And I'm sure there are nuances in the process that I've missed, but the above is what I did.