Hi Pilou, I hope your head doesn't hurt too bad from too much Champagne! ;)
> Can you explain the different options of the "Array function" about the "Curve path"
> item "Free/ Flat / None
> It's writed "Rotation : It's not more"Orientation"?
Orientation is another good word for it... But the way the orientation is affected is by rotations in this case, either around the world z axis, or around the tangent of the curve.
It is the same parameter as "Twist" for sweep along 1 rail. Except it didn't seem correct to call it "twist" here because that doesn't really fit with the "none" option, because "none" means no rotations at all, not just no twisting. (By twisting I mean a rotation around the curve tangent).
If you put in "none" there will be no rotation / no change in orientation of the object, the result is similar to using Transform/Copy.
For freeform and flat, I will give this example:
If you do a sweep with freeform twist, you get this result:
And flat twist gives this:
Freeform does a change in orientation by doing a gradual rotation around the curve tangent. This means that there isn't any abrupt change at any one point, but the shape will be constantly changing and in some spots can end up upside-down.
Flat will only do rotations around the world Z axis. It will swing the shape around the z axis to point it as much as possible in the tangent direction of the curve, but it will always stay pointing upwards. This can work nicely for simple path curves, but it doesn't work so well if the path curve has a tangent along the z axis direction (as you can see in one spot in the example above).
Array curve works the same way as sweep for this, just instead of creating a surface, it creates a copy of the object but using that same orientation.
- Michael
