Every time I use Simple Deform Bend modifier I want to kill myself.
3 Likes
I tried deforming a mesh with 3 million verts and it crashed Blender (ie can’t wait 5 minutes to complete - so I stop the task). Impossible to work in so much high detail.
Generally my poly budget is around 5000-10000, but even so is still not an optimal solution. Is better to simplify shapes in smaller pieces.
? Are you ok ?
I feel for you.
Not sure where your problem lies but if it’s operation itself, perhaps try Mira Tools, linear deformer.
https://github.com/mifth/mifthtools/wiki/Mira-Tools#linear-deformer-tool.
If anyone else knows of any other addon that utilizes bend tool, I’m interested.
Congratulations! You’ve won First Place 
in the BlenderArtists “I’ve Told You A Million Times Do Not Exaggerate” Post of The Day! 
Tell us…when you model in Blender, do you first remove all sharp objects or hazardous materials near your work area? You do work on a lower floor (sub-3rd) in your building, I hope.
Which reminds me of a joke…what’s the difference between somebody who jumps out of a 10th-storey window and someone who jumps out of a 2nd-storey window?
The person who jumps out the 10th-storey window goes…“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH! BAM!” The person who jumps out the 2nd-storey window goes…“BAM! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!”
Bruce Lee did this as well, he was way faster than the speed of sound.
800-273-8255
You may need to get out. Breath. Your priorities seem off.
Try it again. Breath as you do the process.
Yes, i wish all cpu expensive modifiers check their runtime beside rendertime and ask for “break operation” after a given limit of time. Playing around with subsurf / remesh modifiers combination specially.
@rigoletto @const performance isn’t even my problem. I can’t understand how to make it do what I want without a stupid amount of trial and error. I’ve read the documentation page several times. I’ve watched several videos about how to bend things. It’s just not intuitive at all to me which is very annoying because many “unintuitive” things in Blender actually make total sense to me or at least understand the compromise and sometimes I actually prefer the Blender way of doing things. But not this one.
2 Likes
I don’t see what’s hard ? select your axis of choice, turn control object to align with said axis, turn up value
There’s one thing missing though, it’s explicit start/end handles. Right now it’s taking the object bounding box, so not very flexible.
The main takeaway from the documentation is regarding the axis setting, namely:
- X - Points along Z axis bend around X axis
- Y - Points along Z axis bend around Y axis
- Z - Points along X axis bend around Z axis
This is, unquestionably, very clumsy UI design, and could stand a quite straightforward improvement (simply let us choose both axes), but it is what it is.
Something that many tutorials omit is that the simple deform modifier also takes into account the rotation and scale of the pivot object (the “Axis, Origin” field). If you’re not aware of this you can get some very unexpected results.
I can relate to that, but instead of getting auto-aggressive I am feeling murderous intent for the developer who created that shit.
The Spin-tool has an similar potential to make me very, very angry.
It’s just absolute horrendous UI/gizmo Design that isn’t fit for purpose. It could be so easy.
2 Likes
Simple and elegant, praise open source.
Without looking at the actual tool… that’s very confusing.
IIRC, Mira tools version is much more understandable, but it may not be a modifier.
what does “points along” mean?
random example
I want to take the left and bend it around y axis to make the right. Should be simple.
Instead I have to bend it around z axis instead and then rotate the object itself 90 degrees. But what if i had a reason for keeping the object in it’s original rotation of 0,0,0? Well to get around that I need to make an empty and parent the bent object to the empty and then rotate the empty by 90 degrees. OR I can add an empty and tell the modifier to use the empty as the origin of the deformation and rotate that empty by 90 degrees to get the bend to go in the correct direction, and then I have to parent that empty to the object so when I move the object around it doesn’t change the bend…
I’m usually the first asshole on right-click-select to respond to proposals with a long list of steps they can use to achieve their desired results but even I can’t stand all the steps involved in using the damned bend modifier. Twist, taper, and stretch all seem to work as expected. Why not bend? If every other deformation required the assistance of an Empty I’d probably be less annoyed.
Bend works with Local Coordinate system, not World Coordinate system. Z Axis is z axis of your object, not World.
Change “Global” to “Local” on up your 3D Viewport Window and and active “Object Gizmos” on “Viewport Gizmos” panel. By this means you can see axis your selected object.
Maybe can add new option like “Use World Coordinate System” or “Apply After Transform” or like this.
my object is stretched along x, subdivided, and I want to bend it around its local Y (which happens to line up with global Y as well because I have not moved or rotated it)