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Moulding Tutorial : Making moulding with corners

Making moulding (or molding, if you prefer) with corners

Thanks to Andy Colebourne at Inivis.

This moulding is very easy to create in AC3D.

Our first step toward creating this is to make the moulding profile.

1. Turn on Gridsnap for this tutorial. I set the grid size to 1.0 major, 0.1 minor.

2. Create a cylinder with 12 Segments. If you want your results to match these results exactly, create the cylinder by clicking in the Front view so that it assumes a default 1x1x1 size.

3. Enter Surface Select mode and select all of the surfaces on the left side of the cylinder in the Front view.

4. Perform a Surface | Cut Away Object on these surfaces. Drag the selected surfaces down until the top vertices of the new object line up with the bottom vertices of the original object.

5. Perform a Surface | Flip Normal on the selected surfaces. This ensures that the new surfaces will face the same direction as the original surfaces.

6. Return to Object mode and select the original cylinder half. Duplicate (or copy and paste) the object and drag it down where the top vertices of the new object line up with the bottom vertices of the lowest object.

7. Select all three objects and perform an Object | Merge.

8. With the new, single object selected, enter Vertex Select mode and perform a Vertex | Snap Together By Distance.... Specify a value of 0.0005 and click "Snap". This ensures that all vertices that joined our original three objects together are in the same exact place.

9. Back in Object Select mode, perform a Object | Optimize Vertices.... You should see a message that 4 vertices were removed.

10. Go back into Vertex Select mode and select the top 7 vertices, then resize them horizontally to about twice their original size by dragging on the right center select handle.

11. Back in Object Select mode, use the Front view to shrink the width of the entire object down to a slightly smoother shape, as seen in the Front view here. Notice that I also widened the entire piece of molding in the Left view.

12. Once more in Vertex Select mode, select the top-most and bottom-most vertices and perform a Vertex | Extrude Edges. Nothing may appear to have happened here, but two new vertices were created. Drag the selected vertices to the left in the Front view, as seen below. Hold down the Ctrl key while dragging to ensure they only move left, and not up/down while you drag.

13. Now we need to convert our moulding profile to a single line. In Vertex select mode, select all of the vertices of the moulding and perform a Vertex | Align to Axis | Z. With that done, go back into Object mode and perform a Object | Optimize vertices (this should remove 21 vertices).

14. Your surfaces have just become invalid (they all should have turned cyan in color), but that's ok - with the object still selected, set the Surface type to "Line" using the Line button found in the bottom left of the AC3D window. See the image below for a before and after shot of the conversion to a line.

15. Position the profile so that it sits precisely on the Z axis, but is in "front" of the X axis. The image below shows the Front view and Left view of the profile. It doesn't matter how far away the profile is from the X axis' origin, as long as all vertices are to the right of the origin.

16. In Object mode, perform a Object | Revolve, using the following settings:

Revolve settings: Degrees = 360 Axis = Y Segments = 4 Offset = 0.0

You will end up up with an object not unlike this one:

17. If you only want one corner, select the surfaces you no longer need and remove them.

This leaves us with a complete, albeit simple, moulding. Rotate it 45 degrees on the Y axis to get the length/width axis-aligned, and you can easily resize it.

You can take this as far as you'd like - here's an example of some more ornate moulding-type construction. This was created with a little more custom shaping of the molding profile.

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