Struggling with curves and arrays

Support Modeling
1

Maybe someone can help me, I’ve been struggling with this for quite a while now.

I need to build a model that can be easily changed and resized in the future. In the file you can see that I have a cube that is arrayed into a long bar, then follows a curve, then gets wrapped around a circle.

Questions:

  1. Why isn’t the straight segment of the bar level? In other words it’s following a part of the curve that is level, but the bar isn’t level.

  2. How can I make it so that as I resize the circle, the rod stays anchored at the top center of the circle?

  3. Is this even the right way to be setting this up?

Any help will be greatly appreciated!!

Attachments

Curves Confusion.blend (456 KB)

2

I don’t think I quite understood your question but I’ve tried something. So you tell me if this works for you .blend

3

My bad, I’ve just noticed that I should have moved the mirror modifier above the solidify modifier in order to avoid inner faces on the mirrored mesh.

4

Thank you very much for taking the time to help me.
I just have a couple of follow-up questions.

First, I see that you used a nurbs curve rather than a bezier curve. Can you tell me why?

What purpose does the bevel modifier serve? I can’t see any difference when I turn it off.

Finally, why does one of the two examples look like it’s made of smoke?

Again, thank you for taking the time to help me, I’m really stuck here.

5

Dear mowenwanders, I suspect that due to usage of drivers in the .blend file the bevel modifiers aren’t working properly since you have to enable “reload trusted” in order for bevel modifiers to take effect. The option should appear on the top/upper tab of blenders main window every time you open the file.

In my completely subjective opinion the bezier curves are much better than nurbs curves because of the various types of handles that allow much better manipulation over shape of the curve.
And about the smoke part, I don’t know.

Don’t worry, once you enable the drivers for bevel modifier it will be very obvious what purpose they have.

These question haven’t been answered chronologically to your question but they were answered from most important to least important.