Create a washer, looks ugly!
 

I'm trying to create a washer, like the piece of hardware.

Unfortunately, it looks pretty choppy.

take a look at this pic (its just 4 lofted circles)


any ideas what i can do to fix it?

http://www.dev-elements.net/ugly.jpg

I can't see the entire washer, but from the looks of it, I'm guessing you took two cylinders and booleaned them, correct?

The solution is easy, but you'll have to start from scratch. Create a cylinder. In the channel box, click polyCylinder and change the subdivisions Axis to a number that gives you a smoothness you like. Duplicate it, scale it accordingly, then boolean>Difference.

yeah, just need more geometry to get it smooth.

Its actually 4 circles lofted together...i need to pick up on this boolean gig, sounds big to me :-P

NO!! Booleans are horrible, because they only work %50 of the time. Creat a cylinder. Go to faces mode, go to top view. Selet everything but the out side faces, delete them. Select the faces you have left, and go Polygon, extrude. Then switch to your scale tool. Hold Ctrl, and click on the Y Axis Scaler. This is move the X and the Z the same, but not the Y, then drag inward, to make it the right size. then go to object mode, and select the cylinder. Use you scale tool to make it as tall as you want it.


Sounds complicated, its realy simple. And i promise if you do it right, it works %100 of the time!

Uhh, booleans will work fine if it's just a few cylinders. Don't make him afraid to use them Ultragames. The only times I have ever had trouble with booleans is when I have complex geometry or when I have a lot of history on the objects being used.

My point: Try booleans because they aren't horrible.

Siber,

It looks as if your tesselation values are too low. With your lofted circles, go into the attribute editor > tessellation > U/V Divisions Factor and crank them up to like 1.5 or so. Should smooth everything out for you.

Booleans will work fine also if you want to go the poly route...create a cylinder. Duplicate it and universally scale it in a bit then up in the Y so you can see it. Select the outer cylinder first, then shift-select the inner. Go to polygons > Booleans > Difference and it will hollow out the cylinder. It's important which cylinder you pick first. Otherwise, you may get undesirable results. Just scale it into the washer shape afterwards. You would then play with smoothing to get it as smooth as you want.

Like everything else, there are plenty of ways to achieve the same result in Maya.