A little help with a Bend Deformer please?

[RobMeade]

Hello,

I have used this tool before and at that time I ran into some difficulties, but I managed to resolve it, sadly its been quite a few months and I have no idea what I did.

What I am trying to do is create a 90 degree bend in a piece of tubing.  So, I have a cylinder, I a good number of height divisions to allow for the bend.

I found a site online which offered a calculator for establishing the length of the outer arc based on the raidus of the corner I wanted... so, as an example, I used this, 90/360*PI*10cm, the result was approximately 9.42cm.

I set the height of my cylinder to 9.42, and applied the Bend Deformer, leaving the low/high bounds at their defaults (I don't really understand what these do and couldn't make sense of the documentation), and then added 45 in the curvature for the degrees.

The result is this:

Looking at the ends of the mesh, they don't seem to make it all the way around to 90 degreses, at least, not on the outer edge, the inner bend looks about right.

Thinking back to where I believe I was successful before I think I may have moved the bend handle, in the image below I've tried this, but again it hasn't worked.  It does perhaps show the issue though, I would expect the mesh to be at the tips of the curved bend handle line in order to make the full 90 degree bend.

I do appreciate I could move the outer verts and algn them with the inner one to get the ends to be straight, but this feels a bit hacky and will mean that one of the segments will be larger than the others.

I also realised I could use a torus, I have in fact tried that and the result was perfect, but, I would like to know where I'm going wrong/what I'm misunderstanding, so I can use this tool correctly going forward.

Your time and expertise and most appreciated and thank you in advance 🙂

[osidedan]

Yea the bend deformer is definitely not intuitive haha. by default it tries to put a bend in a middle of an object. we don't want that, we want the bend to start from the bottom to get the result you are after. Here's how you can do so:

1. create your cylinder.

2. create your bend deformer with curvature set to 90, low bound to 0, High bound to 1. 

3. set the scale of the bend deformer to match the height of the cylinder (9.42 in your case).

4. Move the bend deformer to the bottom of your cylinder.

Those steps will get you this:

Hope that helps, and I hope that makes sense! Let me know if you need any extra info, or if you would like to know more about why that works.

[RobMeade]

Hiya @osidedan,

Thanks so much for providing me with an answer to this problem.

I think in between I found another way, although this evening I ran into the exact same problem again and recalled posting here, your answer really helped me this evening, thank you 🙂

Oh, and yes, if you don't mind explaining why that works I would be grateful, moreover, why it just doesn't work without having to change the scale, wouldn't it be more intuitive if it just did what was expected, e.g. type in 45 degrees, you get 45 degrees, not 45 degrees, minus a little bit for no obvious reason! 🙂

Thanks again, Rob 🙂