PIPES

[wyldmagik]

Just getting to grips with maya, looking for some info on a simple way to model vrious angled pipe shapes. I have been able to create them in 3dsmax rather straight forward but if anyone can point me in the right direction for this with maya it would be most appreciated. Ive had a try with a curve and a circle and then lofting the circle along the curve but the loft tool dont seem to operate the same way it does in studio max. if not maybe another forum somewhere if this is not the right place to be as a fairly new maya user. Many thanks Jamie.

[-b-]

You are going about this the right way..except...that you want to "extrude" and not loft. Draw your curve, then put your circle at the end of the curve, then select the circle, then the shift select the curve, then extrude....play with the settings to get the desired result you want. Either before you create it in the options box or in the history that will come with the object on the right hand side of the screen. Oh and you want "at path" turned on I think. Hopefully this is what you want.

[wyldmagik]

Thanks a lot, I'll give it a try

Jamie

[oroborus]

I actually like the Crv2Tube (Curve to Tube Mel) which make a cylinder from ay curve, which means if you have a lot of cords, pipes, strings, etc. you can just draw them as curves, and then easily runt he mel and it instantly makes them all, and they retain history so you can activley rebuild them, or tesselate them as necessary.

[-b-]

Can you get that mel script here at highend? Sounds cool.

[oroborus]

http://www.highend3d.com/maya/mel/?group=m...ection=modeling

called Create Tube 1.4

or skip straight to the web page.

http://dirk-bialluch.mayaring.com/mel/html...reateTube.shtml

The added benefit is that you can mess around with the curve after you have run the script and the tube on top will update. (which means whenever I have to bind a tenicle or cord or something, I just use this script and don't delete history on it (if you have too many it slows your comp down, but it makes for much better looking deformation, and much easier to control too, than conventional binding of tube objects.