I have been very frustrated dealing with branching spline shapes. When they are rendered, the point of intersection is rendered as overlapping cylinders, rather than a single object branching apart. I need something that can take splines sharing a common “knot”, and create an effect similar to that of “rendering/enable in viewport” but with the point of intersection as either a “V” or “T” for 3 spline segments coming together (preferably with the ability to select which one for each branch), or a “+” for 4 segments coming togehter.
As I see it, this would involve 1) creating lofts from the spline segments that stop short of the actual intersections, and 2) connecting the appropriate edges together using new polygons, possibly also createing new polygons for the intersection area.
Other helpful features would be 1) the ability to control the number of sides, as with enabled rendered splines, 2) The ability to control the width of each spline separately, and 3) The ability to control the size of each of the intersections.
I think there are similar features in some of the tree and/or ivy generating scripts out there, I just want one that will apply it to a manually created set of splines, rather than one that is generated by the script.
Any help on this would be great!
Done
Adjustable in the Sweep modifier Interpolation rollout at Steps:
Not available.
You can however adjust the object(s) width in the Sweep modifier Parameters rollout at Radius:
You can also create other named sets to run the script on and run the sphere script I mention below.
Could write a seperate script to draw spheres,boxes,whatever at the verts.
- Add a Sweep Modifier to your Editable Spline (the branches MUST be splines inside the same object)
- Set the Build-in Section to Cylinder (or any other you want)
- Un the Sweep Parameters rollout, check “Union Intersections”
RESULT: The branches will be booleaned together.
Hm, I will give that a try to see what it gives me, but in my experience booleans tend to give pretty messy results. I was hoping for something more along the lines of the connections shown in this thread: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=98&t=140236&highlight=branch
The first and second examples shown are actually pretty good examples of what I meant by the “V” and “T” connections.
I did not tell you to use booleans. I said to check the intersection option in Sweep which takes care of combining the sweep meshes together.
Malkalypse,
I got your email from ScriptSpot.
global WERSplinesArray = $Line* as array
global WERNumSplines = WERSplinesArray.count
withundooff
(
for i = 1 to WERNumSplines do
(
try
addAndWeld $Line01 WERSplinesArray[i+1] 0.01 -- # is Threshold
catch()
)
)
select $Line01
modPanel.addModToSelection (sweep ()) ui:on
$Line01.modifiers[#Sweep].CurrentBuiltInShape = 4
$Line01.modifiers[#Sweep].UnionIntersections = [size=1][size=2][color=#fffffe]on
[/size][/color][/size]
Thanks for the direction Bobo