I’ve been trying to model a mobius strip without much success. I created a Belzier circle for the path, and clicked on the 3D button in the edit menu to bring up the ‘railroad tracks.’ I held down the TKEY to twist the ‘tracks’ along the path.
But a couple of problems.
1)I’ve been able to twist the path through 3 of the 4 control points, but since the last one is also the first one how do I finish twisting the path in that last quarter circle.
2)I’ve been using a slender rectangle for the profile. When I type the rectangle’s name into the BevOb space, the resulting object is ridiculously distorted. Not even close to being a mobius strip. It starts wandering off into 3D space even though the path is confined to a plane.
3)I tried a follow path constraint on the rectangle, but that hasn’t helped.
well if the first one is the same as that last one why dont you copy the first one :S it might worklol i know it works with spokes and things like that
1.) Start of with a rectangle of w/e length (in top view)
2.) Add 10 or so loop cuts parallel to the height of the rectange (not the length)
3.) go to side view and use proportional editing to rotate one of the ends 180 degress (you should have the twist in the middle)
4.) go back to top view and put the 3d cursor on the edge of the rectangle at the center.’
5.) Use the warp tool (Shift-W) to give it the circular shape then connect the two ends together.
Thanks for all the tips. I’ll give them all a try later this evening. One thing I tried was to model 3/4ths of the Bezier Circle, and twist the “railroad tracks” along that length. Then I hit the Ckey to comlete the circle hoping the twist would continue to the end. But in the final 1/4 circle it just twisted back to its original orientation.
Hoehrer, I"m having trouble getting the gap bridged, whether I’m using Fkey or the Bridge Faces script. Could you explain it?
pOOf, thanks for responding. I’ve got Wings but there isn’t a moebius strip. Besides, I want to be able to model it in Blender so that I can use my own profiles (square, triangular, rectangular.)
Your question reminded me of a 3D program that was capable of making complex mobius objects. I can’t remember the name, and I’ve been searching Google and Wikipedia for about a half hour now.
Hobbes, are you talking about TopMod? That’s the program I want to build the moebius for. Actually you can make a moebius within Topmod, but you don’t have much control over it. The one I made looked more like a heart than a circle. I want control over both the profile and the path.
Hoehrer, thanks again for the help. I finally found my problem. I needed to go into Vertex select and close the gap by connecting vertices. Using edge select was giving odd results. Blender was apparantly getting confused by the twist. (see pic below.)
I played with the moebius in Topmod tonight and tomorrow I’ll do a rendering. I’ll post it when it’s done.
I did a couple of quick renders after playing with the moebius in TopMod. The first was done with Blender’s internal renderer and an enviro map. The second was done in Jafray with GI. Thanks again for all the help.
PG1, if you don’t have TopMod you can get it here. You really should go through the Instructional videos in order to learn how to use it, espcecially number 3 which shows how to do high genus symmetric shapes.
To create the model in the renderings above, In Blender I started with a simple square extruded along the moebius path (above left in the pic below.) Then in Topmod, I applied the Catmull-Clark remeshing to get the mesh at above right. Then I created a crust and began deleting portions of the mesh to get to the one seen at bottom (that’s all explained in video 3.) Then I applied the Make Wireframe to get the final look of the model.
(Note: TopMod likes to crash alot, so save often. And when you export you need to type .obj at the end of the filename or it won’t save your mesh.)
Ok! I see. Definitely there’s some techniques that you cant perform in Blender and if you do you need a lot of skills, but its a freaky program, what am getting little bit stock is in the twist and subdividing the mesh but am sure I can get it done. Thanks for getting back to me.
Steve, just wondering what did you do with your normals. The few times I have played with mobius strips my normals would obviously be facing opposite directions at a certain point (as I expected they would). So how did you get around that or was it even a problem?
what am getting little bit stock is in the twist and subdividing the mesh but am sure I can get it done. Thanks for getting back to me.