Anim8or Community
General Category => General Anim8or Forum => Topic started by: Astantax on July 30, 2008, 08:53:17 pm
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Hi all, I'm a long time lurker, first time poster.
Anywho, I'd sure love to make tubes, wires and pipes that curve and bend every whichway. I can't seem to make anim8or want to go ahead and extrude a shape (like, say, a circle) along a spline, like in the manual. It comes out looking like a ribbon instead of a pipe or tube.. The manual says:
Note: The "center point" for the extrusion is the initial origin of your spline. Make sure that you create the spline around the origin or the results won't be what you expect.
I don't know what this means.
- Brian
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Astantax ---
Check out this screen shot. Hopefully it should help answer the "origin" issue.
(http://img240.imageshack.us/img240/9822/twistycurvegs9.jpg)
As you can see, the n-gon is AT the origin, while the spline curve, along which I extruded the n-gon, is not. The important thing is to make sure the spline you're trying to extrude starts at the origin. Otherwise, you end up with weird, ribbony extrusions, as you've described.
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There is a script that will make tubes, wires, and pipes where you draw the spline and rename it and the script creates the tube. See this post:
http://www.anim8or.com/smf/index.php?topic=21.msg6516#msg6516
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Further to Rudy's comment, you can change how one spline maps to another by changing the orientation of the splines' pivot point. In other words, if you were to select the N-Gon in Rudy's example and change to the pivot point mode (button under the arrow at top left of the toolbox) and use the rotate tool to rotate the pivot point (do this in wireframe mode so you can see the multi-coloured pivot point) the N-Gon will map to the spline differently. I find that if you create the spline curve and the N-Gon in the same view (for example, Front view) they map correctly, at least the example Rudy gave would. I have only had problems with this when creating the two splines in two different views.