I'm far from a blender expert, I only really started using it properly last weeek when i discovered this nascent thug mapping scene, so this is probably not new or exciting for anyone who knows their shit but people expressed interest so I thought I'd share this technique I've been experimenting with.
So first you wanna make the shape that is going to form the cross section of your bowl. to do this i create a cylinder, hit numpad 7 to orient the camera above and select the edges of the bottom left hand corner.
then press SHIFT+D to make a duplicate, click your mouse and then press P and click 'selected' to seperate the copied edges as its own object. Delete the original cylinder object and you should be left with this:
Now at this point you can modify the shape as you see fit, for example if you're making an above-ground pool you could add a top and sides by extruding the top vertex left and then down.
when you're happy with your profile, in
object mode with the shape selected, press ALT+C and click "curve from mesh/text" to convert the geometry into a curve, also probably give it a more descriptive name than Cylinder.001.
finally, still in object mode go into the tool palette on the left and set origin to geometry to centre the curves origin on itself:
now you ready to design your bowl.
With the view still looking down, left click somewher and create a bezier curve:
Now go into edit mode, you can drag the points and handles around with the right mouse, and if you press E you can extrude another point from either end of the curve. Mess around with this until you have the shape which is fixed in your mind's eye:
then if you want to have a complete loop you can select the two points on the ends and hit F to close the shape:
now with the pipe curve selected, in object mode, go to the curve options in the thing on the right and select your shape in 'Blend Object' and tick the use, UV button, so it generates some UV's which will save you hella time later. It is also worth turning on backface cull in the menu that appears when you press N, this will allow you to check the faces are uh facing in the right direction. If they aren't, enter edit mode with your pipe shape selected, select all the points, press W and click switch direction. Similarly, you can change the pipe profile from the inside to outside of your bowl shape by reversing the direction of your bowl curve.
at this point you can still mess around with the pipe shape, so go ahead and experiment, moving the points of the pipe slightly back or forth on the x axis can have a dramatic effect on the bowl for example, so go ahead and experiment.
When you're happy, select the bowl in object mode and hit ALT+C again, doing the reverse of what you did before, to convert it into a mesh:
to fill the bottom in you could select the loop at the bottom by ALT-Clicking it and pressing F but i reccoment just creating a plane and lining it up with the bottom since it will use far less polygons and be easier to texture.:
Im not gonna cover the whole texturing process because its long and no fun and also well documented already but if you apply a texture and stretch the UVs generated by the Blend Object process real wide along the x axis its a pretty good start.
oh and you can make a hole that matches the rim of your bowl by duplicating (SHIFT+D) and separating (P) the rim. and then going into that new object in edit mode and extruding it by selecting it all the edges, pressing E to extrude and then Z to lock it to the z axis, and then using that as the object with the Boolean modifier on a large plane that is aligned with the top of the bowl, like so:
Press apply, delete the extruded rim objects. Now go into thug tools and assign your verts and rails like so, using ALT+RMB to quckly select the edge and face loops:
and prettymuch you ought to be done now. This is a pretty useful technique which can be applied to all sorts of architecture and objects and things beyond bowls so go nuts
and if you fuck up and forget to set the scale before you start like i did just scale everything up a buunch.
Hope this helps, and if anyones a blender wizard man and i said anything bad or stupid please say!!
thanks xxx
