New User with a Question

[Medrod]

Hi everyone. My name's Rich and I split my living between Mesa, AZ and Everett, WA. Fortunately, I'm retired so it makes for a fun life. I've been wood turning for just the past four or five years. I've been making mostly segmented travel mugs and bowls, but about six months ago I started with open segmented bowls. My personal lathe is a Delta midi and when in AZ I have access to a shop that has about ten lathes. The largest thing I've made is a 12" salad bowl that I finished last week.

My interests are peaked by patterns and designs so I found the Lamination and Woodturner Pro s/w to be of interest. I've been trying one program for several days to begin learning it, then activating another and doing the same thing.

Three or four days ago I activated WTP and that's where I'm have a problem. Hopefully, someone will understand what I'm trying to describe and be able to help. Remember, I'm just trying to learn the software and there is nothing important about the number of rings, the profile, wood thickenss or height. Here goes.

I start with default values and a maple disk. To better see what's happening, I start with maple, redheart, and walnut in a 12 segment bowl and Paint Repeats checked and set to 4 per row. I add a row and in Ring View, starting at position 1, I don't need to do anything on this ring since all segments are set to maple. I select position 2, right click and select redheart, then go to position 3, select, right click and choose walnut. I go to vessel view and everything looks correct. Back in ring view, I add the third row, put redheart in position one, walnut at position 2, and maple is in position 3. Again, in vessel view, everything is great.

I now add a 3rd ring (I now have the disk plus three rings for a total of four rows). Keeping the same rotation, I put walnut in pos 1, maple at 2, and redheart at 3. In vessel view things are not right so back in ring view & step through the rings. Ring 3 is correct but ring 2, starting at pos 1, I now have displayed redheart, redheart, maple (the pattern is repeated around the ring, of course.) Ring 1 is now maple, redheart, redheart. If I change Ring 1 back to what I want, rings 2 & 3 shift.

What am I missing??? Thanks for any help you can give me.

 

[mfisher]

Welcome to the madness.

One of the things I do is to design my bowl with all its rings and layers made.

Then I go about painting the design I want in the bowl by changing the wood species in VESSEL VIEW. Doing it this way I have not had a problem of shifts. I have experience shifts when I added a ring/row or deleted a ring/row

At the very top of the menu bar in wtp is a left arrow, left curved arrow ,and a right arrow. The center arrow when selected rotates your bowl

You could post your wtp file so one could look at what exactly you have done.

I am in AZ . we spend the winters in Sun City West. One of the best woodshops around. Summers we escape to Payson, AZ

 

[Medrod]

Attached files show the undesired (self) changes

My parents retired to Sun City, for 10-15 years in 1975, then Sun City West until they died 2000 & 2001. Dad loved the heat; Mom hated it. From June to Sept, she'donly come out of the house after dark and then it was only to go somewhere air conditioned. Dad would go for 3-5 mile walks even getting up at 4 a.m. in July to do so.

If I can figure out this Forum for attachments, I'll add two WTP file -- 3RowTest and 4RowTest. The first shows what the project looks like with two segmented rows and is what I'm trying to accomplish in my exercize. 4RowTest shows the project with the third segmented row added. You can see how segmented rows 1 and 2 have morphed.

 

[mfisher]

Thanks for posting the files. It helps to see what your dealing with.

- What I see happens when rings are added or deleted with a pattern. Hopefully Lloyd will correct me if I am giving bad advice.

- I would build your bowl in wtp with all the rings added before painting (selecting wood species.) example 1
- When completed, then paint/select wood species. (example 2)
- You can select multiple segments by holding down the ctrl key and clicking the segment with the mouse. Then select the wood species. It will paint all selected

I would recommend you view some of the tutorials that Lloyd has made

 

[Lloyd Johnson]

I can shine some light on this but I have to warn you - your question that is somewhat confusing will get a confusing answer. :->

This issue has to do with the rotation of segments that happens on alternate rows. On odd numbered rows, the left edge of segment number 1 is 0 at zero degrees. On the next even numbered row, the left edge of segment number one is shifted by half a segment (7.5 degrees in this case). So if you start a design on an odd row, painting segment one on row one and segment one on row two will have one effect and starting on an even row would have a different effect. I'm afraid there isn't any way around this because the software has to have a way to keep track of segments and numbering them is the easiest way to do it.

Painting based on segment numbers isn't a good idea, though, for this very reason. As Mike has suggested, you want to first construct your vessel and then paint from the Vessel View as this will give you WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) results. Painting from the Ring View does not allow you to see the relationship between that row and the surrounding rows.

There is a trick that I like to do when painting a vessel but only if you have imported a wall profile from 3D Design PRO: I select all the rows and then click the 'Specific' radio button in the Multi-Row Resize box at the right of the screen. I then type an outside diameter of 5" (or some other arbitrary number). This snaps all outside diameters to 5" which creates a cylinder. It is much easier to paint a cylinder than a vessel that has a wall profile that varies in diameters as the segments in a cylinder are all identical.

Once you paint the vessel as a cylinder, just click the Profile-SNAP button and all diameters will snap back to the wall profile.

Give this a try and you'll see what I mean.

Lloyd

 

[mfisher]

Thanks Lloyd.
I like the more technical explanation.

 

[Medrod]

Thanks for the explanation. I knew there had to be a reason for what I am seeing. It may be hard to believe, but the layer by layer view gives me a good image of what the finished product would look like -- probably too many years designing multilayer pc boards.

I like, and appreciate, the idea of creating a cylinder then snapping it to the wall profile. That'll give me something to practice.

Also, mfisher, thanks for the information. It gave me a solution to the changing rings I was experiencing.