T-Splines Tip – Panel Line Breaks

I figured I would do a quick little step by step on making panel line breaks with T-Splines.  The first thing is to make sure that you have an isocurve, or isocurve loop that follows the panel line break that you want.  This sometimes can be tricky – in the case of this windshield, I did the topology layout with this in mind.  Here’s the loop of isocurves that I want to form the break on – it’s the junction between the main body and the front windshield:

Now just run tsBevel, the options I use for something like this are: Segments = 5, Positioning = Distance, Keep on Face = Yes, Retopo Snap = No.  You’ll need to play around a bit with the bevel distance, in this case I found that 0.09 worked nicely, but you’ll have to adjust it for each model, depending on size.  Here’s what you get:

Now select the middle face loop, and set your drag mode to UVN:

Now just push that face loop inwards using the normal (blue) arrow.  I like to do it numerically, so that I can make them consistent.  I used a value of -0.05 here, but again you’ll have to play around a bit for each application.

Now just run tsMakeUniform.  You should do this after every change in topology.  In smooth mode you get this:

It’s quick, it’s easy and it looks good.  Can’t beat that!

 

 

 

Published with permission from Better Living Through CNC.