Beveling NURBS Cube for making dice
 

I'm racking my brains trying to find a way to bevel the edges of a NURBS cube for the purpose of making dice.

I've attached a render I did with using polys and booleans, but it is EXPENSIVE in render data!

Is there a way to do this with NURBS?

:confused:

I wouldn't use a Nurbs Cube because of the way it is created. It is 6 seperate nurbs planes grouped together.

Nurbs are a bit limited in that way.

What you could do, though, is use a Nurbs sphere and shape it into a rounded cube.

Well, if you want to go the NURBS route, and don't want to deal with the 6 planes that Mike mentioned, you could try this:

1. Draw a cubic curve in the shape you need to define the top/bottom vertices and edge....basically a "C" shape....straight except for little curved areas where the corners will be...2-3 pts for the corners will be fine.

2. Go into your Revolve options and choose "linear." Revolve 360 degrees with 4 segments. This will give you box-shape that is all one object.

3. To make it more dice shaped, in the channel box, switch the revolved surface to cubic and add more segments (12-16) which will give you a cylinder shape. Then in the top view start scaling hulls into the shape of the die.

If all this is too much, I'd just stick with the bevelled poly cube and texture it with bump maps for the dots.

The photo is a poly surface with bevels, but the problem was I had to smooth the heck out of it in order to get rid of the faceted look that was on each "numbered" side after booleaning out the spheres. Because of that, the model got extremely large in poly count.

Is there a better way to boolean out the spheres without getting a faceted problem on the faces?

Read the last line in my previous post...Instead of booleans, you could just bump map the dots.

Ahhh, gotcha. Can you help me figure out my initial problem cause now it's bugging me.

This is my poly cube before booleaning the spheres...

and here is the cube after booleans. see the faceting? how can I correct this without smoothing and making super huge poly count? is it possible?

Also, the reason I would want to do this all with modeling and not bumpmapping is so that when the dice are transparent, you can see the inside of the dice as they look naturally. Don't think a bumpmap would give me that look, but I could be wrong.

The reason you have faceting, is because of the lack of divisions in the large face you are booleaning. The indentions of the number holes are not "connected" with the rest of the geometry, so to speak.

I would not use so dense a sphere for the booleaning.

OK, thanks. I'll try that.

How can I obtain a more rounded corner on this poly cube that has been beveled?

probably need to split it manually

Is it possible to make a face out of the corner and work on smoothing it from there?

there is a face there. The selection handle for it is centered at its position, and with a face curving like that, the handle is probably under the surface.

Try looking in wireframe view.

OK, getting back to this little project. I found the face in wireframe and selected it. I've tried splitting the faces and subdividing but didn't have much luck. I got creative and tried poking the faces (as shown) but I can't figure out if that will get me to having a smooth corner. Any suggestions?