Chain Link Fencing?

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Hi all,

I’m a relative newbie to Blender, and have a project I’d like to model. It’s a Dog Park, an oval-shaped, fenced field about an acre, 75 yards by 60 yards.

I made one 3D model of the watering area and its drainage to submit to the city for approval of a project, and this went OK.

Next I wanted to make a model of the whole park since there are a few other projects.

I spent a couple days learning more Blender and making a mesh model of the chainlink fence, used a cylinder with extruded sections at the bend in the wire and rotated them to make a ‘perfect link’ 3 1/2 inches, then kept Joining them together to make a wire 5 1/2 feet tall, then joined them across to make panels 1/2 foot, 1, 2, 4, & 8 feet wide.

Finally, they looked perfect and I set out to putting in the fence posts and these panels…

The problem is that each of the 8 foot panels adds a few megabytes to the .blend file, so using a hundred or more is not the solution, I guess. I put about 20 of them in there and the file is a couple hundred megabytes already…

Can anybody suggest a better solution for this?

Should I be mapping an image of a chainlink fence with transparency between the wires to surfaces of the above sizes instead of making them with individual wires?? If I make a gif with transparency between the wires and put it on a surface, will Blender render the transparency OK?

Thanks for any discussion of this. I’m not using Blender much for character modeling or gaming, but have had good success with using it for architectural models, 3D network diagrams, &c, hope to be into some animation with it this summer.

#2

Generally you would alpha map a chain link image to a plane. And yes Blender will render that beautifully.

#3

Also, normally you would post this in this forum:

http://blenderartists.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=13

Timothy

#4

Either use an image or use a cube instead of a cylinder. Make it low res, because at any real distance it will look exactly the same.

If you use an image, I think blender should handle the trasnparency fine (theres a button in the image texture bit).

Ian

#5

Thanks, it took a while, but I figured out the ‘alpha map a chain link image to a plane’.

There’s also the ‘ZTransp’ button to push in the ‘Mirror Transp’ tab and this works almost fine.

And, I apparently need to get a plugin to work with .gifs, which wouldn’t display at all. I used gimp to make the non-wire parts of the image transparent and saved as a .png and it renders fine. In the process I found out that the ‘world’ is textured and to get the best image I put another plane, colored brilliant green, behind the 10MByte fence built with mesh segments, and this made it easy to select the color to make transparent.

Now I’m wondering how to make the image ‘warp’ with fence sections so make the model of the dog park perfect. Meanwhile it’s good enough to make our plans.

And I’ll check out the 13 forum recommended, sorry to mis-post this.

Thanks again for the help…