Cerbera

They are merely disconnected poly islands within the same mesh. And they really have to be disconnected for this sort of panelling to be useful / work. No, it shows the opposite of that, the green lines being being borders ie places where polygons are NOT connected to the adjacent ones. Yes of course; seletcion tools in component modes don't care what is connected to what - you can select it regardless. The answer to getting the result you wanted above, ie preventing those cross-corner parts is to split that mesh into either 3 or 6 separate meshes. So either pairs of cube faces on each axis, or each cube face individually. That way they can all go under a cloth SDS, and it will be impossible for it to add thickness across corners. CBR

Ah Ok I get ya... that'll be because you seem to have inadvertently set your modelling axis position / orientation to World and World, as opposed to Selected and Axis like they used to be !! Mine'll look a bit different to yours but the main fields should be the same... Once you've done that you should find that coords manager reflects the current selected component using the selection tools as well as the transform ones. CBR

Ok, I found a key difference between your left and right meshes. The one on the left has every panel disconnected, as shown here by mesh checker and the green lines, whereas the one on the right does not have a border round every panel, so some points remain connected when thickness is added, which I think is leading to the problems here. Presumably that is something you can fix in divider ? CBR

You are using a floor object, a special kind of primitive which stretches off infinitely into the distance in the render, but this is not shown in the viewport, hence your possible confusion. You can fix that by replacing it with a plane of the right scale for your scene, which will be of finite and definable size, and therefore can stop when you want it to, leaving some horizon visible. CBR

You are going to have to elaborate on that, because even with the file I have no idea what you mean ! How you can you 'mislay' coordinates - coordinates of what precisely ?!! That mesh does have some problems with duff topology (ngons etc), and its axis is in a weird place, but its coordinate system seems fine ?! You can get your coordinates manager back by just loading the default layout again, or getting it from the Windows menu and re-docking it. Lastly, please update your profile to show which version of Cinema you use. There is a hell of a big difference between R21 and S26 for example... CBR

Oh so it did ! Very pleasing 🙂 CBR

I don't think there is anything you can do about that, other than try another seed or pattern in divider or manually apply extrudes to each side independently. If you turn on mesh checker you will see that what divider has done is essentially split the mesh into hundreds of individual islands with exactly coincident borders to surrounding pieces. Cloth Surface is not expecting that, and struggles to deal with it predictably. CBR

Yes. You work from the outside in and move incrementally smaller sets of components up slightly on Y, like so... Then you can tweak the points to match the reference more exactly in the orthographic view(s). CBR

Select that outer perimeter edge loop, and ctrl drag backwards with the move tool ! If you only go back half the distance of the mid band you can use Z symmetry to get the rest like I did below. Then select the perimeter ring of polys and extrude them a tiny amount to get that little ridge, then add your SDS control loops. Next, here's the topology you need to cut into that to achieve the subtle inner curvature of the divot bit. I should show you that a bit closer, so you can see the control edge separating the 45 degree corner edge from the border, for it would be a mistake to run that all the way to the edge... it goes inside the control loop there. CBR

Yep, you're nearly there ! Now you just have subtly adjust the second loop in from the perimeter to make the gaps more even like mine and so that the corner points follow the rounding a bit more. Always look for the half way point in both directions if you see what I mean... this sort of thing... So just make it as even as you can, but it doesn't have to be exact, though you can increase the chances of that using <2 way symmetry of course, where you'd only have to tweak a quarter of it. CBR

No, I think my original plane was 4 x 10 - much more square form polys... CBR

I'm surprised you can't see that from the mesh I showed above ! Look at it again, and you'll see it is just made from a plane with a suitable amount of segments, the corners drifted in a bit so you get decent rounding, and an inner extrude which establishes the perimeter edge flow, and allows you to pull the right curve out of it. And then I would hope you could see how to extrude the perimeter of that back to get the centre band, into which you'd add a centreline edge loop, which would give you enough topology to create the centre capsule shaped divot where the controls are. Is that the bit you're struggling with ? If you're doing it mid poly it's a pretty simple model. CBR

Modelling the holes is really making your life unnecessarily difficult, and there is an argument that SDS is not the way to go with this model because of the hardness of the edges everywhere, and the amount of effort required to get the holes utterly distortion-free despite the curvature of that surface. That is why I come down on the side of VB for this, because it isn't a problem for that. But, if you are a glutton for punishment it is certainly possible 😉 The principal stages would be thusly... 1. Make a single hole from a 2 x 2 plane, maintaining its square outer perimeter. 2. Clone that into a grid array that closely matches the reference using precise values so the clones meet exactly. Make that editable, and remove the excess clones you don't need on the corners. 3. CO&D all those into a single mesh, and optimize. 4. Expand that section using the existing topology into the rest of the side using normal poly tools. keep the mesh density similar throughout. 5. next, build the sort of low poly SDS mesh I showed above for the whole side panel, but flat - ie with no curve, but with exactly the sort of topology you need to be able to add that curve, which is the edge flow I showed. 6. Get a Mesh Deformer on the holes mesh, make the SDS of the low res model the cage it needs (apply it if necessary), and initialize it while they are both flat. Now any deformation you add to the low poly mesh will be applied to the high poly holes one too, allowing you to get the curvature you need. However as I mentioned above, this will subtly but noticeably distort the circularity of the holes wherever things get most curvy, and the only way to remedy that is to manually adjust (or fit circle with project to surface enabled) the points on the ones that are wrong once you have applied it. Lastly you would apply that deformation (CStO) and add thickness via Zero-Extrude and move. the rest of the mesh can be regular mid poly SDS. CBR

At its simplest, we can make the speaker faces with this sort of density... ...and that might be even enough to displace holes into if you're lucky, and want to tackle those via textures. If you are modelling the holes, then you will still have to build something like this first so you have a surface to project or conform the holes mesh to, because that is invariably going to be created flat first if you go that way... OR, you could go the volume builder way, and abandon SDS altogether ! So that is just the front panel above (but without the sides) thickened, and under L4 SDS, in a volume builder / mesher, with a grid-array cloner of cylinders subtracted from it. You can make the cloner editable and delete the clones so that you get the patterns you want in the corner areas - I only did it roughly, but you get the idea hopefully... If you do go that way, you will need a very low voxel size - 0.5 or similar, which will produce a horrendously dense mesh you can try and rescue with ZRemesher, though I don't envy you the time that will take to calculate ! CBR

It depends on how you want to handle that massive array of speaker holes. If those can be done via texturing (black dots etc) then this whole model will be relatively simple, and can be handled with low-mid poly SDS modelling. Whereas if you need those holes physically there in the model then things get orders of magnitude more complex, and you would be best building this in 3 main parts - the central band and the 2 side parts separately. More help available when I know which of the 2 approaches suits more... CBR

Yes me too. Whilst I don't mind chatting with friends and family on discord, it's not really the sort of place where I want to do real-time problem solving, where people expect answers at conversation speed, which doesn't allow any time for prep, or experimentation, or even thinking of alternatives to the first idea that comes along. But it is rather worrying that Google can't index new questions - how are new people ever going to find us if that doesn't continue ? CBR

Hi Pete Welcome to the Core 🙂 We will need you to complete your profile so we know which version of Cinema you are working with - the rigging tools have changed, subtly or otherwise with nearly every version in the last 5 years, so we need to know which tools are available to you. Also, and I presume not, but you should say if you are using the character object, or if it is a manual rig, and include a screenshot so we can see the general setup.... I'm not a rigging guy myself, but hopefully someone who is will be along at some point... CBR

43 people this week. And we are kinda in the holiday period so people might be away... But there has definitely been a huge drop-off. I used to get about 3 modelling questions a day to answer - now I barely get 3 a week and this week not even that ! CBR

No. Layouts shouldn't go there - the layouts should be copied to the library / layout folder within your preferences folder (which can be opened directly from within Cinemas preferences; see button at the bottom), and then the program restarted, after which they should show up. CBR

You'd think it wouldn't have hurt to send you a link to it asking if that one would be OK, hey ?! CBR

I am not the person to ask about that - scene nodes are only slightly less new to me than they are to you ! Fortunately, Noseman is much more with it, and has produced this lengthy but helpful video on the subject... CBR

Apart from the Takes System, which is useful for keeping lots of different versions of models in the same file, there is no specific functionality for building web configurators AFAIK. Cinema can produce organised scenes from which you can produce the various renders that typical web configurators require but all the actual configurator functionality is provided by the web software platform itself, and is typically nothing to do with the DCC software. CBR

That is what Srek is saying I think - you need to GET it in the object manager via node capsules before you can texture it ! CBR

That has been mentioned to them 🙂 CBR

I think it's probably a bit much to expect new features monthly - that's not enough time to test them thoroughly !!! But the Asset Manager gets new content much more regularly... CBR