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Author Topic: Dumb things. What rules to follow with pivot orient and spline align for a2s?  (Read 1911 times)

Screenscene vfx

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Heya Folks!

I'm doing a load of set extension things so it's a good excuse to use railclone to make a load of brick, plank and slate presets for period architecture. Using a similar setup to the tiles tutorial I'm making an A frame roof with the x spline drawn in the front viewport and the y spline drawn in the top. if I want the lines of tiles to run parallel to the y spline, I'll be using the top and bottom inputs with my sequence alternating along the x between the half size tiles and full size tiles. I've to rotate my tiles along the z by 90 degrees so that their width is parallel to the y or depth of the roof. What I find is when I connect the top and bottom sequence segments, the "default" input doesn't slide each row in and out to match my sequence of small and wide tiles. It works totally fine if I use the left and right inputs instead and sequence along the y but that isn't the alignment I want for things. It's as if railclone isn't outputting the bounding box of the sequence properly along the top / bottom axis. Any thoughts or what dumb thing am I doing?

Cheers!

John


Screenscene vfx

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Scratch that, rule 2:

"Because the A2S array is a stack of L1S generators, if you use Segments with unequal sizes on the Y axis in a row, the overall height of that row is determined by the tallest segment"

That's almost a bit of a pity if you've to use the top and bottom bits with an offset design, I reckon I can solve it with another sequence put into the default with either offsets or some such - is this a thing that'd ever be likely to change? All fine if it's just a thing you've to work around!

Cheers,

John

Paul Roberts

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Hi John,

The problem with using the A shape as the X axis for the roof's generator is that the tiles on one side of the roof will be upside down. Ideally you would have a separate generator for each side so that the tiles are correctly oriented. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Firstly you could use a closed spline for each pitch of the roof and use it as a clipping path. There's a script to make this a little easier you can download from here and see used in the video below.




Alternatively, In the attached file I've adapted your roof so that it uses only the ridge spline and a pitch and size parameter to set the angle and length of the roof. I've also added the ridge tiles to this too and tried to make them adjust automatically to the pitch. Here's a little video of it working.




I hope that helps, please let me know if you have any further questions.

Many Thanks,

Paul
« Last Edit: July 25, 2016, 07:06:32 PM by Paul Roberts »
Paul Roberts
iToo Software

Screenscene vfx

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Paul you're an absolute legend. I was trying to be lazy and get some kind of all in solution but why complicate things.

Thanks again for the great support.