Very cool, Alex!

Thanks all for input and comments and Pilou the Vizcom image regen is pretty impressive from the black and white render AI certainly moving along. The above workflow works well for a reconstructing a 2d spline into a series of tangency arcs trying to do the same workflow for a 3d curve - does anyone know if its possible for the cont/arc tool to follow a 3d guide curve as in this image I can get it follow only in 1 viewport. any advice once again welcome.

Hi Alex,

re:
> does anyone know if its possible for the cont/arc tool to follow a 3d guide curve as in this image
> I can get it follow only in 1 viewport. any advice once again welcome.

In MoI when you pick points in one of the ortho (Top/Front/Right) views, the points will generally be projected onto the view's grid plane going through the previous picked point.

This is so that when you are drawing in a 2D view you can know that points you get are on that plane.

This restriction is not applied when you pick points in the 3D view, that's why you're seeing a difference when using that view. So if you want to have several points in a draw tool follow a 3D path then pick them in the 3D view.

- Michael

Hi Alex,

I just tried doing it with Arc > Cont. That works, but you'll need to make small steps and work in the 3D viewport only. While picking the 2nd point of each arc move the 3D view around to get an overall sense of how closely it's following the freeform curve. From some angles it might look like a perfect fit, but from other viewpoints you'll see that there's actually a big gap.

Doing this with the built-in Rotate view control will be very painful because you need to rotate the view back and forth while picking the 2nd point of each arc. I'm using a SpaceMouse and that works pretty well for this.

One thing I noticed is that the resulting polyarc tends to kind of oscillate around the freeform curve. If you need it to look really smooth you might have to change the freeform curve so that it is more like a few long arcs and straight lines. Or you'll need to make really small steps which the people doing the bending probably won't like. Or you might need to find a fabricator with a CNC bender designed for doing freeform curves rather than just radii and angles.

- Peer

Thanks again for advice all working nicely