Cutting/slicing

[Zafar Iqbal]

I've been cutting/slicing some tile shaped meshes for the past couple of hours, and can't help thinking that there must be a better and way faster method of doing this.

I have a curb that defines an edge, and the tiles needs to be cut, to fit the curvy curb shape. I'm using the Knife tool for the tiles, mostly knifing a single tile at the time, and sometimes have to use the tool twice, because Knife only slices in straight lines. I have an underlaying grid, where I use the Add Edge tool. This allos me to add a point in the middle of a polygon, and then change the direction of the slice - is there a way to do this with 3 dimensional meshes, but without having to go through every single polygon? Something like a mixture of the Knife and Add Edge tool would be so much better.

however, the work flow would gain a drastic speed boost, If I could be able to simply slice using a curve, but I can't do that... or can I?

And lastly - it seems some (all?) tools, like Knife doesn't work across multiple meshes - any workarounds?

I hope I'm being really noobish here, because what I'm doing and is currently taking me ages, should be accomplish able in 10-15 mins... max.

[grahamef]

What shape are you trying to make? Instead of cutting an existing object, it may be easier to make it from scratch, for example, by drawing and extruding polygons, or drawing curves and using Curves to Mesh, or some other way.

[Zafar Iqbal]

Shape doesn't really matter, but anyways: http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/942/60023872.JPG The cut off corners leaves room for smaller square shaped tiles.

I'm at home now so can't show exactly what it's about, but heres some pictures to help illustrate the problem:

http://www.millermicro.com/SharpCurbA051109.jpg
The curb resembles very much the one that I made - the bricks are however much smaller, but they do show that some bricks are cut so they can fit. This particular design is very structured, and would therefor be easy to do.

http://www.scottishtileandstone.com/pic4_large.JPG
A bit more like my tiles and how they are angled/laid out - size is pretty much the same as well. Tiles are too big to be hidden beneath the curb, so they need to be cut.

http://www.johnbridge.com/vbulletin/attachment.php?attachmentid=28455&stc=1
Shows the nature of my curb - this curvature is a bit extreme compared to what I made, but it doesn't really matter - I still have the same problems. Tiles being too big and needs to be cut, as well as needing a more flexible tool than the Knife tool, because on some occasions a straight cut either cut off too much, or too little. I overcame this by knifing multiple times, and it wouldn't have been a big deal if I only had to cut a couple of tiles. But I had way more than that.

Ps. I finished cutting just before I left work, but I would still like to know about this. I'm either being a noob here which I hope, or XSI needs more flexible slicing/cutting tools. This task would really have taken me 10-15 mins. max in my previous 3D app, but took me 3-4 hours to finish in XSI. Too much of that time went on selecting alone, which IMO isn't optimal either.