• Hi all and welcome to TheWoodHaven2 brought into the 21st Century, kicking and screaming! We all have Alasdair to thank for the vast bulk of the heavy lifting to get us here, no more so than me because he's taken away a huge burden of responsibility from my shoulders and brought us to this new shiny home, with all your previous content (hopefully) still intact! Please peruse and feed back. There is still plenty to do, like changing the colour scheme, adding the banner graphic, tweaking the odd setting here and there so I have added a new thread in the 'Technical Issues, Bugs and Feature Requests' forum for you to add any issues you find, any missing settings or just anything you'd like to see added/removed from the feature set that Xenforo offers. We will get to everything over the coming weeks so please be patient, but add anything at all to the thread I mention above and we promise to get to them over the next few days/weeks/months. In the meantime, please enjoy!

Follow Me - Ha I wish!

9fingers

9fingers

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A cry for help.

I just cannot make the follow me tool work despite watch some tutorials on line.

The project is my barrister bookcases. I have taken the model of a single unit, stacked and aligned five of then and made them into a single component.
Looking at the back of the stack, I then drew a section of a possible crown moulding and moved it to the back right top corner of the stack.
Next I panned round to the front of the stack and tried to use follow me tool to pull the moulding section around the side, accross the fron and back along the second side.

Sometime the moulding will do the first edge and then stop, other (most) times the tool will do nothing.

Thinking that the faukt might be with my stack of bookcases, I drew a rectangle pulled that into a 3d shape and then added a simple square as a moulding section and that worked but I cant get my candiadte moulding to follow me around the simple shape and neither will a simple square mould follow me around the bookcase stack.

Does the moulding section need to be made a component? Trying to group it seems to fail

Help......


This is a screen clip of my starting point of top of the stack and my candidate moulding.


I just don't understand the problem. I'm using version 8.0.4811 which is the latest version my PC will accept
 
It's working OK here.

follow.JPG


It does always confuse me though and I'm never sure I really understand how I got there :)

To make a frame using follow me I had to hold the alt key down when dragging the section to extrude. I drew a big rectangle as the face to follow. maybe that is the problem - it needs a simple face to follow and you have a number of pieces making the surface?

Maybe practice on a new drawing first.

you could draw a simple face on top of your cabinets and make it a component you can delete or edit to something else afterwards.
 
Thanks Robert, Your post gave me some good ideas and some observations.

Abandoning my idea for try to apply the moulding to a cuboid and using your suggestion of a rectangle worked well. So maybe "follow me" follows a line. However making the rectangle a component to ease selection and deletion did not work. "Follow me" does not seem to want to follow lines belonging to a component.

This is possibly why it would not follow round the top of my bookcase stack. This seems to be the first thing I've found to counter the mantra of making everything a component. :D

When "follow me" is going to work, a red line appears to indicate the line it will follow - if this is not seen, the operation fails. Also there are some circumstances when it will only follow the current line and not go further. I don't know why but cntrl Z undo and try again can sometimes work without apparently changing anything.

Incidentally using alt whilst (or is it prior to?) following, makes it fly round and follow all the way round the guide shape - I only wanted the cornice on three sides but could be useful for simple applications.

I think I've got to a similar level of following to yourself Robert. ie I can make it work when it wants to play ball but not always sure why.

At least I've achieved what I wanted with your encouragement!

Cheers

Bob
 
Bob and Robert, I'm just getting ready to go to the mother-in-law's for Easter dinner. When I get back I'll try to help clarify this for you.
 
Bob, To get Follow Me to work, you need a profile (the molding cross section) which you have and a path for Follow Me to extrude the profile along. Put them in the same context. That is, if the molding profile is a component, the path should be inside that component, too. Or, if the profile is just loose geometry, the path should also be loose geometry.

In the case of your bookcase, we'll assume the case parts are components already so your molding does not have to be in a component. Create a path by tracing around the top of the top case with the Line tool. Then select those edges, get the Follow Me tool and click on the profile face. If you find it easier, you can temporarily hide the top case so you have a clear view of the path.

I hope that makes sense.

d

PS. If you want to send me the SKP file, I'll show you how to handle creating the molding.
 
Thanks Dave, That helps my understanding. I did not realise you had to create a path for it to follow. I'd assumed wrongly that the profile would follow a path on an existing object.

I'll have a play next time I'm on that computer. I'm hoping to make some test profiles from scrap to gain approval from the domestic management. :lol:

Bob
 
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