Creating a screw thread? Spiral?

[luisca]

I heard using the mel script in the unsuported folder works well for making screw threads. I can make the spiral in mel but what do I do from there?

thanks

[failure]

Exttrude the profile along it.
Or create another one and birail the profile.

[luisca]

What the best way to make the spiral fit to the actual screw dimensions... most screws narrow towards the bottom

[failure]

2x2x2 ffd lattice

[joojaa]

Trick is to use hitory to your advantage! Create a cylinder and the use a mel command like this curveOnSurface -d 1 -uv 0.0 0 -uv 2 36 -k 0 -k 1 nurbsCylinder1 ; to create a spiral curve on it (dont worry if maya shows it very segmented it realy isnt)

Then you can maipulate the cylinder by scaling the bottom part points of it wdown and thereby tightening the spiral. Also if you work along with this a vbit youll notice that you can calculate teh exact distance if you so wish.