Hi fleetfoot, those probably won't help you directly to do the weaving, but Flow will allow you to at least focus on making a weave that's all flat in a plane and then you can use Flow to bend it into the ring shape.

That at least takes one degree of complexity out of the equation.


Also you might want to check out this post that uses flow to map a straight curve that has a rise and fall in it onto a curved path:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4785.13

- Michael

nice ring Sebastian, that the sort of pieces my wife wants me to design, ;( , told her she will have to wait, i need to work out how to do it, before I can do it :)

So the way that Flow might help with curve construction would be to first draw a 2D curve in the Front view that has a rise and fall to it, and have a line underneath it kind of like a shadow:



Then you can draw in a separate path curve in the Top view so you've got 3 curves like this:



With this kind of arrangement you can then select the "rise and fall" curve, then run the Transform > Deform > Flow command, and then pick that shadow line underneath it as the base curve and select the other one as the target curve, and that will produce this kind of result:



So you can kind of get an idea there that if you're able to kind of deconstruct the result you want into initially straight components you can then use Flow to deform them onto a new path, so you can kind of build things up by adding one element of shaping at a time which can be easier than trying to directly model the final path all in 3D.

Similarly you would focus on making a weave that was on a plane and then map from the plane to a cylinder shape.

- Michael

I put this aside for awhile, then when I came back to it I finally figured out how to do this circular weave.
This is a true over-under-over-under.... weave of three strands that wraps to form a circle with exact endpoints.
There are no jagged ends or overlapping surfaces or solids.
I put it in the form of a ring.

This rendering I adjusted the material of the weave to be less metallic because
the reflections were too intense and obscured the weaving effect.

Hope you like it. I can send the 3DM file to anyone who might be interested.

Cheers,
fleetfoot

I forgot to mention that I used the FLOW function, and it took me three tries to get what I really wanted. But when it worked
bingo! What a powerful tool!

Hi fleetfoot - the weave turned out really great!

- Michael