CGTalk - 3D Curve Spiral

Ian Jones

03-31-2009, 07:09 AM

I am finding it challenging to easily create a nice smooth 3D spiral. I absolutely love the spiral that comes as a default parametric object in 3dsMax and am wondering if there is an obvious or not so obvious way to emulate this?

I have tried using an imported 2D SVG path from the Illustrator spiral tool, which works fine until I try to make the curve spiral upwards in 3D. I cant get the control points to smoothly interpolate along the new Z axis. 3dsmax has a 'smooth' option for curve control points AFAIK and this would be super handy in Blender too. I don't want to manually tweak them as I want a 100% accurate spiral and I have tried automatic but it leaves ugly kinks as the handles don't align nicely.

Any Ideas?

I guess I can research and script a 3d spiral with python...

Ian Jones

03-31-2009, 07:17 AM

Ack, that was a bit of a naive post... I just remembered there are other curve types 'path' and 'nurbs' I should try first.

handlebar

03-31-2009, 09:51 AM

There is a script that can do spirals but you need to change a few lines of python to get it to work in the current blender, the last page of the thread has info on what to do.

http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=87553

Ian Jones

03-31-2009, 04:06 PM

Thanks, that's exactly what I needed. I'm also having some success with path curves but its the logarithmic curves I really wanted.

:bounce:

I can highly recommend this script to everyone. It is simply awesome for spirals, helix, torus.

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03-31-2009, 04:06 PM

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