Pipes

I haven’t added any progress updates in a while, which I’ll probably add tomorrow since I ended up spending this evening working out how to make pipes rather than spending time on my logbook.

I wanted to add some pipes to my podracer and trying to make them by extruding a polygon cylinder doesn’t seem to work very well. Seeing as I’m not in a class I decided to google different way of making them.

A lot said to make a curve and then extrude a nurb circle around it. This did work, however I couldn’t get the corners to look right. I think this is to do with my lack of knowledge of how the different curve tools work. I made the curve using the cv curve tool that we used for the tron bike and when extruding used snap to control points. I think the problem was that the curve points don’t lie on the actual curve and there isn’t enough of them.

Method 2

Using Bend deformers

create a cylinder and increase the hight divisions in the channel editor.

Go to the animation menu

create deformers > non liner > bend

adjust curvature in channel editor

this makes the bend in the pipe so extrude the edges for the straight parts.

edit

you can increase the number of control points on a curve by going edit curve > rebuild curve. However I found that it had to be increased to about 45 before the corners looked nice, but the extra edge loops on the straight parts can just be deleted afterwards.

I found using the bend deformer easier and quicker to get looking right, however I expect that the cv curve method would be quicker if you were planning to make a longer pipe with lots of corners.