Please do - make the phone tutorial, that is. One of the first models I attempted was the old rotary telephone. It was giving me much trouble and I didn't have the phone to get dimensions so I didn't get too far. I have had so little time to play with MoI for many months now but I still have my desire to master it.

I'd like to!

Most of us, 40 and over, at least had them around as children. It was "the phone". We even had a two-party phone number line until 1980.
I've got to find some better dimensions, then it should be straight forward.

To think, the ubiquitous 1970's style phone is a retro-relic.
In my mind, at the moment I see constructing the body of the phone with maybe first a loft, then the angled face would be trimmed with a simple curved network surface, then a bit of filleting.
But without one in front of me, or some good plans, I'd only be able to conjure a stylistic version.

Maybe sometime next week.

Great tutorial Mike!

Marc

Thanks for writing this, Majik. Never know when you have to model something like this and these kind of tutorials are invaluable when those occasions happen.

Hi Mike,

I tried to follow your demonstration, and it went well, except at the final step my cord shape result has weird twists in it.
It looks like the end parts of the cord change to become the flats and then back again.
Any idea what I did wrong?

Thanks for all your tutorials. I'm finding them helpful in understanding MoI.

Cheers!
fleetfoot

Hi fleetfoot - it looks like you may need to use a few more sections so that the sweep profiles are just a little bit denser.

It looks like you've got just enough space between each one that the profile twists enough until it hit the next one that it gets confused about how to match up the segments between profile. It tries to connect up segments between profiles to minimize distance between them.

Your problem is that right now you've got the wrong segments being matched up. But if you had a bit more profiles there would not be as much rotation happening for each one as it traveled along the path and then tried to match segments so it should help with the segment matching.

- Michael

Thanks Michael,

I shortened the pitch and increased the turns of the helix and that did the trick. Now I know what to look for if a sweep does not seem to give a result I'm looking for.

Cheers!
fleetfoot

> It looks like you've got just enough space between each one that the profile twists enough until it hit the next one that it gets confused about how to match up the segments between profile. It tries to connect up segments between profiles to minimize distance between them.

Fleetfoot, Michael is right. I had to add so many extra segments (a set for each quadrant) because the Sweep command wanted to shift the segment start position based on each profile, and it looked like your example.

It appears that you have found an additional and important consideration when making a sweep for this type of object:

If the pitch of the helix increases, so does the "jump" distance between the profiles that Sweep has to negotiate.
Thus, the solution is to either 1) maintain a slower pitch. Or 2) Add additional profiles in the in-between areas to make the "jump" distance smaller for Sweep.
Notice how I made duplicate profiles in the North-West-East-South areas. Adding more copies in tighter areas, like NW-SW-SE-NE will shorten the gap that Sweep has to jump.


Michael, I don't know if this was a coherent enough explanation to exbound on your above statement... I know exactly what is happening, but I don't really know how to describe it. :-/

Dont forget that "autoplace" can be your friend here too... So no need for 100 profiles. This single profile moved off to the side and swept on the helix, adhere's just the same throughout the sweep.....

Yes BurrMan,

Using Autoplace works well, and will provide the fastest solution.
I can't quite remember why I needed the profiles to "match up", but adding the profile copies is what solved whatever it was.

I know that one object I had was to make the cord look more natural, especially in the tight-radius turn areas, where the Autoplace would overlap or collide result geometry.
And I tweaked the position of some of the profiles to get a natural looking placement.

Nice result on the model Burr. :-)




Notice though, even in your example, you can see where Sweep provided that particular result as it tries to negotiate auto-profile to auto-profile.
The thing tends to twist around a lot in the result.
I don't know about your model, but when I tried it, I had a lot of this creasing stuff where a corner would become a top and a side would become a corner and so forth - with lots of uneven creasing going on.

If a cord like this looks clean in the final render, then Autoplace is the way to go. Would a UV texture unwrapper do a good job with this. (not sure).
But with this point being made, it's nice to have multiple options to accomplish a task.

Autoplace just takes a profile curve that's flat on the cplane and moves and rotates it so that it's perpendicular to the start tangent of the rail. Then after that it's the same thing as doing a sweep with just one profile at the start of the rail.

Then the main thing that will govern a long sweep that uses just 1 profile is the twist behavior for how the profile rotates as it travels along the rail.

The default freeform twist gradually banks the profile as it travels along the path. If you set twist = flat you can then set a direction and the profile will be constrained to only rotate around that particular direction as it travels along the path instead of banking more freely.

If neither of those gives you the kind of banking behavior that you need, then you may need to fill in a bunch of profiles like this to more specifically control it. I guess in this case you would want a similar kind of constraint as the twist=flat but instead of it being in just one constant direction it would be constrained to the tangent of the centerline curve.

- Michael

Hi Burr - are you also using sweep on the 3D curve there or only doing a sweep on the straight one and then a Flow to put that onto the curved one?

- Michael

Hi,
No, I did the sweep with the profile on the helix, with a flat setting, then I would flow it to the 3d curve. If I left the original 3d curve cord in, it was untouched by be. My picture is just the helix sweep. But Majik reminded me of his original thread that prompted him to control it with multiple, exact placed profiles... I didnt check the entire sweep for those other errors, so I assmee'd... :o

But your effort, Burr, reminds us of the versatility of MoI, and it's ability to work around many challenges.

Michaels new plug-in script 10 years from now?

The "fix that for me" button... lol

haha.. fantastic