pipes and wires

lloyd

I'm in the process of adding pipes and wires to a HP and was looking for some help.

for the pipes iv looked at using cylinders then adding a loop around them. rotating that by 45 degrees with constraints edge selected. then deleting the polys on one side and extruding out the new angle. But my problem here is if i want to round off the corner of the pipe.

Iv also been looking into splines. as I'm going to use these for most of the wires.

with splines i can fillet the corner vertex. however I'm finding it hard to add to a spline once I've come out of drawing it. I want to select the last vertex and shift-drag it to make a new line coming out of that vertex .

x1---x2 -->

x1---x2

---

x 3 -->

but all i could seem to do was add [Refine] the line and add a vertex inside the end points.

can you easily add more segments to a line or do i need to make a separate piece and then attach and weld them together? it seems odd as you can extrude bits out of polys but not out of splines.


I went to look over some tutorials but non seem to cover adding to splines. all of them expect you to draw the whole thing out in one go

or does anybody know of any script/workflow tips for wires and pipes?


EDIT: connect copy with segments seems good, its kinda what im wanting with vertexes

Thanks

Playdo

If you're using Max, I haven't got it in front of me but yes, you can. There's a checkbox in the spline rollout that, on creation, makes it snap and weld to the endpoint of another spline.

lloyd

Playdo wrote: »

If you're using Max, I haven't got it in front of me but yes, you can. There's a checkbox in the spline rollout that, on creation, makes it snap and weld to the endpoint of another spline.

Thanks playdo that's definitely something i didn't know about spline creation :thumbup:

That helps when working in a 2d viewport but the other issue is for making pipes/wires go off in different directions.

Here you can see the attempt i did with a cylinder, it comes down then does a 90 degree turn and comes towards the right. it then takes another 90 degree turn and goes off into the distance. but i cant round off the corner like this so I'm trying it with a spline, as you can see this is where I'd want to shift-click in Y


EDIT: i found a work around to do this



Use a thin polygon and shift click its edge into the shape i want. then select the edge and loop and create object from selection. Bingo! a spline in the shape i want in the 3d space.