Hi Phil,
> At a more philosophical level, is my strategy correct (i.e. trace the labyrinth with curves,
> accepting that the branching off will trigger some problems at a later stage, sweep and
> clean up) or should I have approached the whole thing differently?
It's not particularly a problem to have the initial branching structure, it just means that you can't join the segments together at that particular stage.
Definitely the overall strategy of getting curves to start with is a good direction. The main other way you could do it though would be to stay at the curve construction level for a while longer and build the full thickened outline as curves first before starting to build surfaces. That would mainly involve using Construct > Offset to build curves coming away from the centerline and then probably using Edit > Trim to cut pieces at juncture areas.
So then you'd have an outer curve structure like this:
And an inner one like this:
These outlines now can be joined together to make a larger multi-segment curve. Then you can put them on different z levels and then build a surface between them by doing Construct > Loft. If they have the same segment structure (same number of segments in each multi-segment curve), they can be lofted all in one single go, if they have different structures between them you'd need to do it in pieces at a time like select these 2 pieces and do a loft:
And actually you can save some time by doing it slightly differently than that even - just build the outer sized outline and then use Construct > Extrude with the "Tapered" option, as long as the distance and draft angle you use will not cause different areas to collide into each other.
Anyway, some method like that where you're working a little bit longer at the curve level and building the sort of full outline first before generating a surface would probably be more efficient than constructing a lot of sweep pieces from the centerline since then you have to deal with combining the sweep chunks together.
Hope this helps!
- Michael |
