coil along path or bend coil

[Harold_Weistra]

Does anyone know of a way to have a coil folow a path (spline) or make a bend in a coil? 

Thanks for the tips!

Harold

[promm · Accepted solution]

@Harold_Weistra,

Our coil tool does not have a path option and we have not added the requested bend functionality yet.  Below is a video of a workflow to create a coil, then project the path that can be used by the pipe command in sculpt.  From there you can use the edit form tool to "bend" the coil.

http://autode.sk/1YmtAyf

Bend body is in our backlog and may be a solution to your workflow in the future.

Regards,

Mike Prom

[Harold_Weistra]

Hello Mike,

Thanks for the screencast! I will try to work my way around with that. It might do the trick for what I need.

Best regards,

Harold

[TrippyLighting]

Based on your sparse description I had assumed you'd want to do something entirely different.

What Mike is showing in his screencast is that he is basically deforming the ends of a spring.

I had assumed you have a long coil with many windings and the windigs are coiling along a cirved patth. That can actualy be done, but it's a lot of manual work.

It involves many construction planes along a path - the spline in your case. One sketch on each constructionon plane and lastly one 3D spline which will be the path you'd extrude your spring wire along. It will then be a sloid body.

I personaly would probably do this in Blender much, much quicker and then import the .obj and convert it into a T-Spline.

[Harold_Weistra]

You are right, I do want to "sweep"a coil. A But it's clear that's a hard job to achieve, as you perfectly described. What I didin't think of is the solution provided: a t-spline pipe that can be editted 🙂

I'll try to find my way around it and wait for the coil along path function. New wishlist item 🙂

Cheers,

Harold

[Anonymous]

This is also my wishlist item. Coil along a curved path.

😉

[ctbram]

This would be the most painful way imaginable to say make a coil that follows a circular path.

[davebYYPCU]

The Sweep Tool has been upgraded since those days, try Sweep with Twist angle.

[Anonymous]

I tried this awhile back but I will try it again thanks. I have hosing that has an overlay anti-kink coil and I want to do more of an organic look. I ran into problems when I deviated from a strait line path sweep.

[TrippyLighting]

Do you have a picture ?

[Anonymous]

Here is a snapshot of what I ended up doing. I needed to represent the hose with the coil for a rendering of a product. I ended up cropping the rendering and using it in a linear representation of the hose and coil like in the photo but my goal was to represent the hose with a coiled look. 

I tried various methods others had done with coiling around a hose but most were strait line weep solutions like the one I did. One person had a method that worked on curved lines but when the shape or direction of the path changed (like in an S shape) the results were not uniform. 

[TrippyLighting]

That is pretty easy to do with sweep with twist.

[Anonymous]

I will give it a shot. Is this an improvement or an existing feature?

[TrippyLighting]

See this link.

[Anonymous]

Thank you for the link. I have made a coil such as is shown in the example in 2D space. The visual I would like to have would need to be rendered is in 3D space. Think helical coil but more organic where the hose and outer coil would follow a 3D path that isn't necessarily perfectly helical but rather a path that is defined by where you need the hose structure to go in the assembly.  

😉 Hope this makes sense.

[PhilProcarioJr]

@Anonymous 

The method I showed works perfect for what you say you want to do.

It works on both 3d and 2d path data. 😉