Hi All,
In Cinema4D I can create a suspension spring as seen on two of my images,







Is it possible in Moi to make the spring tidier on the ends like with real springs? I can't find a setting in Moi to do so.
Or do we have to move points manually??

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

Hi Rich_Art, there is no built in "make suspension spring" command to do that automatically, but you can use the new Transform > Deform > Flow command to deform a regular helix into something like that.

It starts out like this, with a regular helix and a simple base plane beneath it:



Then you can run Transform > Deform > Flow and use that plane that's with the helix as the base surface, and the other plane-like surface on the right as the target, it will produce this result:



Note that the spots that you pick on each surface during Flow is significant, it aligns the edges nearest to where you click so click on a consistent side of one edge when you're picking the base and target surfaces for Flow.

The reason why this works is that the target plane is not just a simple 4-corner point plane, instead I drew in a curve that had more control points bunched up near the ends of the curve -that basically produces a stretching of the UV space of the surface and that UV stretching will then be incorporated into the flow.

If you turn on surface control points you can see the how the control point structure of the target surface is different from the base surface:



Note that the surface on the left is a simple plane surface with only 4 corner control points, while the one on the right has more control points in it and they are not evenly distributed, there are more of them at the ends and they are spaced more tightly between each other at the ends.


So with this method you do still need to adjust some control points, but you can do it by just bunching up some points on one straight curve which is much easier to manage than trying to directly edit the control points of the actual 3D helix itself.


Hope this helps!


- Michael

Here's one (3DM file attached) that's a bit longer and probably closer to what you want:



Then draw in a circle and sweep it to make the spring shape:




You can turn on control points for the target surface and adjust the points to tweak the bunching and stretching.

- Michael

Oh and there is another variant of Flow where you map things between a base curve and a target curve, rather than surface to surface. But that curve-to-curve based flow will not work for this kind of non-uniform stretching that you want to happen here because the curve-to-curve one matches distance as traveled along the curve.

The surface to surface one matches UV space to UV space, so any deformation of UV space like bunching or spreading of control points will have an impact in the surface to surface one.

- Michael

Thanks Michael, (This is why I wrote what I wrote in my email to you. :-) )

I think this will work for me. I'll test it out.
It is not that I model this every day but I already made some springs in the past and with Moi3D it just is easier.

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)