bendable pipe frame work: possible?

Hi I’m an architecture student getting to know Blender and loving the crap out of it.
I have a question about something a little bit complicated to model and I’m wondering if it is possible.

With NURB and Bezier curves one can extrude a shape along them as in extruding along a path.

And with NURB surfaces(or even subsurfed surfaces) one can pull on a control vertice and affect the surrounding surface.

What I would like to do is model a curvy pipeframe surface of curves(Bezier or NURBS) in which each curve has a circle extruded along it. In this way I can model a framework of bendable pipes described by spline curves. I can make this now by simply making tons of NURBS curves with circles extruded on them and then carefully moving them so that they intersect.

But I would like to be able to grab a control vertice and affect an area of the framework. It would also be helpful if I could get the computer to make them intersect without me having to switch through several view matching them with one vertice at a time. If I could theoretically just extrude a circle along a splined mesh, along every spline.

Is that possible?

Is there some tricky way of linking a whole bunch of objects together that I am not considering? Or using other objects to control them, like a lattice?

If you’re still not clear on what I am trying to make then imagine modeling a net made out of rope. How can you model a big fishing net made out of rope that you can push and pull like a subsurfed surface?

Thanks.:slight_smile:

ok I think someone just gave me the solution by a posting a response to a different thread.

In this way I would have to separate out each individual set of vertices I wanted to separate. That is tons better. There’s is no faster way is there?

Why don’t you just use beveled curves? I’m still not clear whan you are trying to do, but I made this as example for you.

http://savefile.com/files/297568

Use the proportional editing tool (O key)