how would you model this :)

[Tolerate]

create a cylinder
make it live
draw a nurbs curve around the cylinder
make the cylinder not live
extrude the geometry long the curve

[Razvan]

curve, profile, Extrude;
curve, Duplicate, move down Loft;
... live will help you draw the curve.

[iC4]

hm....allready thought on this, but when I draw the curve by hand it will be so unsymetrical :shrug:

and for example I draw my curve with the help of live, is it possible to stick a peace of geometry to the curve with a deformer or something like that?

just watched the softimage experience cd, and they draw a curve, create a cylinder and with some kind of deformer the cylinder sticks to the curve....because with this method I could create a more complex thing than with only one profil and extrude

[Razvan]

I'm not sure I understand what you mean, but you can make an object stick to a curve in many ways, constrains, expressions, motion paths ..., or you can use animated sweep to model things like stairs ..., again, not sure this is what you want ...

[lowkey]

there's a MEL-script for creating spirals like that on A|Ws' site :

www.aliaswavefront.com/en/Community/Download/library/maya/scripts/modeling/spiral.mel;

[gundog]

even better is the Goomoo Utilities v0.5. spirals and then some

http://www.highend3d.com/files/dl.3d?group=melscripts&file_loc=gu052en-v0.5-.zip&file_id=1771

[Farhez]

Here's one way to make a helix:

- create a circle and keep it selected
- bring up the duplicate options box (Edit->Duplicate[])
- set Translate Y to 2 and set Rotate Y to 60
- then hit the Duplicate button

- select each of the circles in order from top to bottom

- do a Surface -> Loft

-> notice how the curves are all in the shape of helix?

- simply select one of the isoparms and do a
Edit Curves->Duplicate Surface Curves

... Voila.

To get a tighter helix, increase the rotation, to change the
height, simply adjust the translate Y value.

Hope this helps.

[Razvan]

Farhez you're right, but it never crossed my mind that making the curve was the big problem ... sorry if I misunderstood ... :hmm:

[Farhez]

I neglected to describe one more setting in my post above.

In the duplicate options box, set the number of copies to 10.

[svenip]

here's my way for creating such things.

go to the top view.take the ep curve tool (set the degree to 1) and just click two points to create a linear curve. after that rebuild the curve with degree 3 and a division of something like 20-25. now translate the curve a bit in the direction away from the side of the curve (Z). now select the curve and go to the deform menu. create a twist deformer on the curve. align the twist with the curve (if it doesn't) and translate the twist back to the middle of the grid (where the curve was originally) . adjust the twist to your needs. also you may wanna scale the curve along it's length and/or translate it more far away from the deformer. you can get every spiral out of this.

[iC4]

thx for the replys, will try some methods :)

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