project spline on to mesh?

Ruz

you can do this in maya no probs, but can't seem to find a way to it in max. Any ideas?
Basically the spline should hug the surface of the mesh

SHEPEIRO

you can do it if you have a nurbs based object easiliy (convert to nurbs?)

Ruz

hmm you can't convert to nurbs from polys in max as far as i am aware

SHEPEIRO

oh i thought you can right cvlick on the stack and convert to nurbs, could be wrong i never use it

Ruz

he he yeah i was thinking along those lines and you can't unfortunatelty. ah well i am sure there is a script somewhere to do what i want

thomasp

are you looking to replicate maya's live surface thing? if so, check out freehandtools by fred moreau. that one let's you paint splines onto a surface if i recall right. used it in the shag hair days to make guide lines.

Eric Chadwick

Wrapper used to do this.
http://www.scriptspot.com/start.asp?p=ma...pper&Page=1
But it's dead.

You might try Poly2Spline, use the Conform compound object, then convert it back to a spline.
http://www.scriptspot.com/start.asp?p=download&ID=3022

arshlevon

tim scripts are some of my favorite max scripts. there are tons of scripts in the installer, but i choose a few to actually install. there are 3 in there that might be of some help to you.

Conform_Wrap.ms :This script will conform one mesh to the surface of another mesh or meshes. What the script does is shoot a ray from each verts positive and negative directions. It will do this with the taget mesh once then again with its' normals flipped. It will find which ray is the shortest then move that vert to that location.Once the mesh is conformed a morph modifier is added to the original mesh and the new conformed mesh is added as a target and the mesh is deleted. You can then collapse the mesh or delet the modifier then rerun the script. If the morph modifier already exists then a new target will be added to the existing morph modifier.

another cool feature is that you can just goto the vert level and only conform a cluster of verts to another model and not nessasarily the whole mesh

there are 2 others, but i find conform does everything i need
Expand_Wrap.ms expands model to fit a larger one
Shrink_Wrap.ms shrinks model to conform to a smaller one

i use them ALL the time.
http://www.time-in-motion.com/


**edit**
as far as a non script solution you could try creating a spline with snaps on and make sure you have face checked only in the check boxes.

Ruz

wow thanks for the replies. will look back in to it tomorrow. yeah I have tims scripts intalled, never thought of using that
arshlevon - that last idea is a good one. never had much luck with snap to faces though

Eric Chadwick

Oh, there's also the option in Editable Poly to convert a selection of edges into a spline. Kind of the reverse of what you want I guess. But you can choose whether the spline is smooth or linear. Then you could refine it with snapping to Face if you want.