Bending a Pipe in a perfect radius

Artistic Support Animation and Rigging
1

Hello everybody,

for a special rigging purpose i have to bend pipes in a way
that they always bend in the same radius on every point
of the pipe.

For example if i put two connected joints on the pipe,
it is bending around the jointconnection, like in this video:

Thats not the result i need, it should more and more form a circle,
i hope it is clear what i need, sorry for circumstances, i’m not a native speaker.

Thanks a lot for every input.

best wishes
stefan

2

Have you tried using the Skin Modifier? It would allow you to bend the “pipe” anywhere (even adding new bends as you see fit), and rotate at any angle without actually rigging. Just a thought.

3

Any reason not to use curves instead?

4

As far as i can see the skinmodifier came with blender 2.64, because we are using a robot simulation middleware (morse) we are only allowed for using blender 2.61 at the moment. The Idea of using curves is great, but unfortunately i don’t know how to rig meshes in blender with curves. Any idea of a good instruction?