Twisted surface

[piergiacomo]

Hi.
I am tring to find a solution to model a parametric twist surface made by this long square straight segments.
I have tried with the 2s generator and a clipping area and a  surface, but the clipping area needs an offest or there will be a deformation and the end of the segments itself are deformed vertical along the normals of the surface...
the result should be like the pink one on the attached image, ( made by rendered splines), the segments should remain straight without any deformations and ending excatly at borders of twisted mesh.
and there is also a reference image
thank's for help

[Paul Roberts]

Hi,

Thanks for the interesting question. As you've pointed out, in order to use surfaces the surface needs to be larger than the clipping area. This is because internally the clipping is performed after the geometry is projected onto the surface. If creating a larger surface isn't a problem this may be the easiest solution.

If however, the beams are all the same length, it might be easier to simply wire them to an L1S generator and then use the new Banking features of the RailClone Spline modifier to twist them. You can learn more about that in this tutorial about creating a rollercoaster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nh8Pkegs6l4

I had a go with banking to get something like the following, please see the file attached (I got a bit carried away, it's much simpler if you only want to bank a simple row of beams)



Cheers,

Paul

[piergiacomo]

HI Paul
thank you for the reply, unfortunately the beams has variable length, so i guess the 1s won't work... will try again with a larger surface,
cheers
Pier

[Paul Roberts]

Hi Pier,

Please see the attached for another possible approach. I'm still using banking gizmos, but this time an X spline also serves a dual function. On the XY axes, it sets the path as you'd expect, but on the Z-axis it defines the length of the segments. The length is calculated by measuring on the Z-axis from the spline position to the Z position of the RC object's pivot.



Hope that helps,

Paul

[RealViz]

Sometimes the use of RC is quite unnecessary. Here, for example, an ordinary iToo clone plugin + path-deform, or Twist, Taper, etc. would be enough.... Anyway as an exercise for RC good :-)

[Paul Roberts]

But it's so much fun!