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I am going to model this passenger consist, but am curious how others might go about modeling the observation car?

My thoughts are to:
1. extrude the body of the car by drawing it from a top-down view
2. then extrude to the appropriate height
3. form the roof with the bevel tool (the rounded end roof is the real source of confusion)

Am I on the right track? (so to speak)
Thanks
Mike

I don't know if this is the easy or hard way, but the bevel did some funny things near the peak of the rounded roof, so I just lined up four objects closely and "object unioned'd" them.  This is before all the unions were completed.  

Mike

quote:

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1) If you still have your object history you may be able to "remove" the merges from the layers list.

2) You could select all of the faces that make up a "beam" and "cut" them and "paste" them.

I very rarely "merge" objects since it is usually adequate to move them to the same group.

Richard

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 taken from a different post

In this case, is merging a good idea, as all the other faces would be a waste of resource, and I want to model the interior?

Mike

I'm pretty sure that "merge" won't remove the unused faces on the inside.  I think a "union" would, however (it's one of the boolean ops probably on the lower right side of your screen).  Here I will tell you that I've tried your technique (lining up different objects to form the shape), and then when putting them together via a union, or just exporting it and seeing it in the sim, sometimes I see some side effects from where the objects "fit" together.

For example, I always seem to have a hard time getting the objects to fit together so that there isn't a visible seam (especially when viewed in the sim), either due to shading of the two different surfaces not matching up exactly, or due to texturing.  To avoid those kinds of seams, I usually try to avoid making things that should be a single smooth object out of multiple objects.

What I would try to make something like that would be to make something like a lathe object, use a large cube and the boolean subtraction to "flatten" one side of it, and then grab the face(s) on the flat end and pull them to the length of the car.

Here is a VERY rough approximation I came up with using the technique I just described. . .If you need more info let me know.