Brick Arch

[melbs19]

How do I get a soldier course of brick to follow an arch above a window ?

[beegee]

Set up a sweep to follow the arch and assign a brick material to it.

(Radial arrays of a brick element ( in-place family ) are very hard to control )

[John K.]

Set up a sweep to follow the arch and assign a brick material to it.

(Radial arrays of a brick element ( in-place family ) are very hard to control )

Beegee,

I thought sweeps were limited to horizontal lines. Is that not true? Or no longer true in 6.0? [I haven't made the switch due to deadlines]

jk

[hand471037]

Sweeps can actually go to any plane, as long as you define a workplane. This is a great way to make something that will 'swing' or change both angle & length parametrically, for you can tie the sweep path to a reference plane that is controled with an angle dim.

Also if you pick a path, rather than drawing one, you can have the sweep path go completely 3D- it's way cool. :)

[melbs19]

I set up the sweep and applied the soldier course material,
but it gives me horizontal and vertical lines - coursing doesn't
follow the arch. What am I missing?

[gregcashen]

The image map is just that, an image that is mapped to whatever object you assign it. The image does not know that you want it to curve with the arch. To do this, you would either have to photoshop a curved arch and make a new material with it, then try to somehow get it to align with the arch...or I suppose you could model the arch as a series of bricks and joints in a radial array and individually assign the materials.

In short, you are not missing anything...

[BomberAIA]

There was a window w/ a brick arch in RUGI. I enclosed it, I hope this helps.

[melbs19]

Thank you all for your help! I don't know where I'd be without this site.
Keep up the good work

[PeterJ]

What I have looked at is making an arch form in a single piece with the relevant brick material applied as a map, but using photoshop or similar to remove mortar so one has a flat colour and then applying a parametric array of a void around the arch to get the junctions, if you wanted to get really smart that void could be combined with a mortar fill.

I have never had the time to explore whether this would work, it was just one of those thoughts after I had long given up the matter in another project and used an inplace family, since all the windows were the same!

[gregcashen]

If you assume that the brick arch is only going to be one course high, then you could make an image map that extended radially to infinity in the "vertical" direction and then you would not have to worry so much about the vertical alignment of the image map. I still thnk it would be difficult to control though.

[hand471037]

I did exactly this to get some grout lines perfect on a stone-clad planterbox. I made the main body of it the black polished stone, then put stripes of 'grout' over the top w/a flat white material. Looked good, and then you can control the grout lines to match the design intent, rather than futzing with UV settings, which IMHO suck in Accurender...;)

So when I've got to control seams on anything, I'll either model them with the reveal tool, or overlay them directly, and not rely on the material settings.