While playing around with sweeper, I figured out a way that I could emulate a building plug-in from another program I have, and I started laying it out in tutorial form. I had wanted to get it completely finished over this past weekend, but I had to stor short of the roofing section. Since I won't have time to work on it again until this coming weekend, I wanted to give everyone a chance to take a look at what I've got so far, and make any comments or ask any questions you might have.

Although there are other ways in which sweeper could be useful in the creation of buildings ( duplicating windows on a path, for instance) there is only one step in this tutorial that requires sweeper, and I'm fairly certain that it would work with the demo version, so don't let sweeper scare you off if you haven't bought it yet.

Anyway, have a look, and let me know what you think.

In case anyone wants it, here's the simple window model from the tutorial... It has it's cutter object already imbedded.

Lazlo,
There seems to be a missing HTML file in the zip.
The one HTML file has an imbedded image but it isn't linked properly either.

Not sure here.

Looks like good info by the images.

Oops. Should be fixed now...

Oh yeah. That did it. Thanks!

That is most excellent Lazlo. A great look at room building and boolean usage.

A few comments if I may.

[Edited out]

On the question you raise about booleans in your tutorial.
The answer is "Yes" you can exclude areas from the boolean cutter but it requires bones. Geometry that is attached to a bone that is a child of the bone with Boolean Cutter turned on will be excluded from the cut. The specific name for these kind of Boolean operations is 'Specified Booleans'.

You can read a little about it here in the Tech Ref:
http://www.hash.com/htmlHelp/v11.1/CustomHtml/Boolean.htm

Specifically it says:

Thanks for the tutorial .- it looks really good!
In some aspects....

Why not have a House Building Branch?
http://www.hash.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=14778

Eg. we can have a library with building components to share!
Perhaps Rodney or Brainmuffin can comment on my proposal
I think it is good.

I haven´t tested with the Sweeper - hope it will function with the free one.
Why cannot Hash by the Roiux´s sweeper?
He only want some beers to sell the rights to it! He told us.
Every 3D program has an inbuilt Sweeper.

OK! I made my wall from Scratch....
And I assigned a bone to the cutter.
I think everything has to be more described in detail
I had to have a look in the help before I understood a little.
Using HTML-pages is good but you cannot describe the steps - it will take to many pictures to scroll through - why do you not use WINK, brainmuffin?


OK! Here is the result using the Simplewindow...
What has happened?
Some good explanation?

And a little skylightning - five minutes!
Thanks to brainmuffin.

Very cool tut Lazlo! We should have a buildings contest. You can never have enough buildings. Could you not use Sweeper to build the door sections with holes in them? It might be time consuming though.

Heh I like this typo....(i.e. loving room floor, hallway floor, etc.).

Lazlo, that's great! Thanks for sharing. I have sweeper and I'm loving it, but I had not thought of this at all. I was hoping some more talented individuals than myself would do something like this Looking forward to the finished piece so I can try it myself. I never knew how to use the boolean cutter either, so great to learn that.

Tom

That's Excellent news Rodney! I'll update the tutorial this weekend with that info.

So actually the best way to do it then would be to make the doors and windows like I explained, with the boolean cutter object imbedded, BUT, assign the cutter a bone, and assign the rest of the window ANOTHER bone, and make that bone a child of the cutter.

Then the whole operation with taking out the windows and doors, etc. and leaving the cutters behind becomes uneccesary!

And, since that'll make them more compact and portable, we can trade door, window and staircase models....

Excellent thinking Lazlo........I have to count on you guys to be so creative with your thinking...im brain numb......I get to feeling like a leech......

Thanks for sharing and the tutorial.

Michael

Seven,

You said:

Seven,
I think what you refer to here is a WIP.
If a Work in Progress becomes popular it can grow and become a project.

See you in the WIP Forum?

The only way to organise such a thing would be if it was the topic of a contest. There needs to be some goal. Like the Movie "Branch".

You're talking to the wrong people if you would like to add sections to the forum.

To me there are no wrong people!

I believe I have to talk to the ones going to use it first.