Drawing pipes

[Anonymous]

Is there a way of drawings pipes? I've tried drawing lines and trying to make them thicker, but don't seem able to. I've also tried to use the offset function to make a line wider but this only produces a flat suface and not a 3D image. Any ideas?

[josh.goldstein · Accepted solution]

Hi Andrew,

You can use our Sweep tool which can be found in the Advanced Modeling Toolbar or by shortcut SW:

You'll see some instructions on the left. You'll select the profile first (the cross-section shape of your pipe) - this can be a face if you want the resulting pipe to be solid, or a curve if you want the resulting pipe to be open at each end:

Then select the path you want the profile to follow.

Neat trick: you can hover over the first segment in the path, then hit Tab to pre-select the rest of the connected edges, then click again to finalize the selection. This might be faster than manually selecting all the segments, depending on the complexity of your path.

Once you have the path selected, hit Enter or click the checkbox in the UI in the upper-left corner.

Hope this helps,