Dupliframes--Creating joined mesh

Support Basics & Interface
#1

I’m trying to make a curved rectangular bar–like, you take a rectangular metal bar and bend it into a nice curve.

I made a bezier curve. Then added a mesh plane, made it into a rectangle, made the curve the parent, dupliframed the rectangle along the curve, made the dupliframes real, joined the dupliframes.

Now I’ve got something that looks like a curved stack of playing cards. There are no edges or faces running along the outside of what I want to be my bent bar-- only a bunch of cross sections of the bar, unconnected to each other! I can’t seem to get the edges and faces reorganized the way I want them to be.

What am I missing?

I think I want to work with a mesh plane, as opposed to with a nurbs, but I’m not sure. After I get the bent bar formed, I want to further change its cross section, making the cross section change along the length of the bar.

Maybe I’ll get into keyframes and ipo curves, as I’d like to vary the x-section smoothly along the length of the bar…

But first I need a bar, not a stack of playing cards…

Thank you.

#2

i know u said meshes not nurbs.
but have you looked at this.
http://download.blender.org/documentation/htmlI/ch22s03.html

#3

You would have had to use a nurbs surface for the rectangle and then skin them after dupliframing. It would be easier however, to just use a curve and bevob which is well explained in the docs.

GreyBeard

#4

Thank you-- I will try it using nurbs.

I was going with regular mesh becuse it seems to be the most straightforward type of shape, the easiest to understand. (I’ve got a long way to go with Blender…) Is there really no way to take the stack of cards, join the corners, and make faces on the outside?

As for Bevob, Is it possible to have the bevob change along the path, not just by scaling, but actually changing from one shape to another? If so, I’ll certainly try it. I’ve seen the taper curves section of the documentation, but as far as I could tell the bevob didn’t actually change along the curve, just its size was scaled.

To begin with, I’d like to have the rectangle be scaled up in length as it was scaled down in width-- but if the rectangle could morph into a triangle or any other shape, that would be great.

Thank you again.

By the way, Greybeard, your tutorials are terriffic.

#5

Once you have extruded along the path using bevob (( you can use either nurbs curves or bezier curves for this )) you can convert the resulting curve to a mesh with ALT + CKEY (( in object mode )), then you can add a lattice to deform your mesh. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to deal with subdivision on the mesh which will result in a non-square bar. I suspect you would have to extrude along a path with multiple segments in order to get a smoothe bend rather than a segmented bend. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.