Trying to make a skylight?

Box8068_31c338ee4b

Happy Holidays every body!
I am attempting to make a skylight and I am almost there, but it raises a few questions.
My Idea was to make a group of polygons and pull up the center. It almost works but not quite.
Issues are. 1) It works but only pulls up the poly's attached to center and leaves the others behind.
2) Can I divide a poly with a line and make two poly's? if the triangle in the corners filled the entire corner could I split them vertically later.
3) What am I doing in the model room that causes that " tiger skin" look on the poly's. It happens every now and then, I'm sure it means something, I just don't know what! See attached images. Thanks!
8068

McGuiver

Delete the lines and points marked in blue, then pull up the center. You can always add new lines or points back in where you deleted them.

JoeMamma2000

8068 said:

My Idea was to make a group of polygons and pull up the center. It almost works but not quite.
Issues are. 1) It works but only pulls up the poly's attached to center and leaves the others behind.

You can only move what you've selected.

In your case, you probably selected the center poly, which means that poly and the points and lines that make up that poly are selected. Then when you move them, only those points, lines, and polys will move.

To move more, you need to select more.

But the problem is in your case, in order to make the skylight slanted, you want to move the points that are further away from the center less distance. To do that, you might try (though I'm not sure how well it will work for what you want), using a "Soft Selection". That selects more points and polys than what you manually select, but the further away the points/polys are, the less "strength" there is to the selection, so the further away, the less they will move when you move the center. Hard to describe, easier to see if you play around with it.

Though I'm guessing that since Carrara doesn't allow you to select a "linear" dropoff in the soft selection you probably won't get what you want.

But probably the best approach is what Mr. McGuiver suggested. That should do what you need.

8068 said:

2) Can I divide a poly with a line and make two poly's? if the triangle in the corners filled the entire corner could I split them vertically later..

Yes, you can. Check out the tools like "tesselate" in the Modelling room. I never use the modeller, though, so I can't help much on that.

3) What am I doing in the model room that causes that " tiger skin" look on the poly's. It happens every now and then, I'm sure it means something, I just don't know what! See attached images. Thanks!
8068

Weird. My best guess is that it is a UV mapping problem, where it's projecting a checkerboard pattern on some polys but doing it at a weird angle. Select all polys and go into the UV Editor and do a cubic or planar map along the correct axis (maybe Z in your case?). If you see a clean checkerboard on your object then you're good.