Hey guys!
I’m trying to turn several hundret nurbs curves to alpha planes and I’ve gotten so far as to convert nurbs into splines and then use loft to extrude a shape along the spline to get a nice texturable geometry.
The problem: loft cannot be scripted, so with this solution I’d have to manually create hundrets of loft objects.
Also I’d love to be able to taper/twist the lofts all at once.
Is there a faster and more flexible way of doing this?
I’ve played a lot around “scripted loft” issue and the best solution that I found was to use the Spline as Path Constraint for some shape. Use Path controller parameters to control path settings (position and/or rotation) and Morpher modifier to control the shape. If you need specific twist or scale along the path you can animate the shape transform. After animation is set up you can snapshot the shape and create the skin (mesh).
Have a poke at the sweep modifier instead. Should do what you want.
If you wanted to do Loft it can be scripted, just not directly. You could probably use UIAccessor to automate the button pressing. Personally, I would look at Sweep (as Paul said), Taper, and Twist (or extrude, taper, twist, path deform) modifiers to do what you need. It will probably be easier than trying to go the UIAccessor route and you could instance the modifiers or parameters you want linked together. You may have to experiment with modifiers and stack order to get the control you want/need with the modifier approach.
-Eric
Thanks, guys!
The sweep worked, but I went with path deform in the end, because I needed taper and some other deformations.
Denis have you had luck with SnapShot and splineShapes? The regular Snapshot tool does not capture the subanims of the splines.
i.e. animate a spline shape, both position and vertex subanimation. The snapshot tool makes a copy of the original with all of the animation intact; not simply a true snapshot…
Sometime ago, I took a stab at removing all the animation keys either side of the current frame… but I can’t find that work at the moment.