Multiple surfaces prob...
 

My problem is that I want to 'smoothly' join together all the four ends as shown below. However, when I lofted, attached surfaces, stitched etc, the result was always messy, with tubes flying all over the show. It's probably a fairly basic problem, and I'm just overlooking something. Either way, please tell me how to get a smooth join!

Im thinkin that you might try to build 8 boundry surfaces.

and then what?

HaHa :D

I still a newbie, after 6 months of learning maya in a slow pace.

Practically here's what I would do (but that is just me):

Create the curves that will funcion as "borders" on the nurbs-pathces-to-be. The boundry tool needs 3 or 4 curves to work.

Do the boundry thing, and make the 8 surfaces.

I'm not sure if all of your nurbs surfaces can be attatched to eachother. Maybe you simply can let them all stay as pathces.

But that leaves (probably) the "problem" of "aligning" the surfaces. This is where my knowledge is woid.

So I recon you could try to attatch the surfaces together (the shark tut in the VIP section is a great help to nurbs-work) or simply let the object stay as a pathced object.

thanks for your help. I'll give it a go...

How about this for thought:

I roughly set up 4 circles - (yours could be Offset Curves created off each end Isoparm of each object), and then created a bunch of reference curves between the circles. All the reference curves are snapped to each circle to ensure a nice smooth edge later.

I then lofted all the curves except each corner area (that I have marked in red) to get a surface that follows the curves.

The corner area was lofted separately because including it in the original loft caused the corners to be rounded.

With the surfaces lofted I would then do an Edge Stitch to get everything looking nice and would then select the edge Isoparms of the lofted surfaces and do an Attach without moving.

I haven't finished it but might carry on in my spare time to see what happens.

This should give you a centre surface between your already existing ones which you may then be able to use to attach everything together.

Below is an example of what I did VERY ROUGHLY, without the stitching and attaching.

Hope this helps.

Steve

I just had another play and got all the surfaces created and looking smooth but ran into problems trying to attach all the edges together in the right places.

Anyone else with some thoughts?

Mike's arm stiching tute at the VIP area might be helpful on this :)

Eventually I setled for attaching the two horizontally alligned surfaces together and then filleting the two vertical ones to the top and bottom of the attached surface...