Hey Karsten,



thanks a lot, I really appreciate it.
my mistake was indeed to have created my base surface as a planar oject. Creating it as a sweep or a loop solves the issue i was having and projects the pattern distortion-free around the tube (screenshot 02).




kind regards,
forty

Hi forty, looks like you got it all figured out! Yes like Karsten answered above it can be a good idea to look at your surfaces using Edit > Show pts to see the control point structure of the full underlying surface - it's that full surface structure (shrunken down to contain the active area, but still using the same grid structure) that will be used for the flow, any sort of notches out of the side that are only trim curves won't really have any impact on the flow, as compared to having the full underlying surface itself shaped how you need.

So if you need an irregular boundary you'll want to use something like Loft or Sweep, etc... to construct a full surface that has that structure built into the surface itself - the type of surface you get with Construct > Planar will be a big extended rectangle that then has trim curves on it.

Just wanted to make sure it was clear, it sounds like you have it figured out already though.

- Michael

Hello Micheal,


I did not know that a planar surface is only using trim curves, so thanks a lot for explaining that, it is going to be helpful for future references.


kind regards,
forty

Hi forty, yes for more usual construction it tends to be good to have as simple of a base surface as possible and then any irregular boundaries are trim curves. Constructing things for Flow in particular can be a little different since you sometimes may want a more complex surface since the low level surface structure has a big effect.

Another reason why Construct > Planar builds a trimmed surface is so it can support any kind of complex irregular boundaries like this for example:



It would be extremely difficult to create a single surface that tried to directly follow all the contours of that outline, meanwhile the method of constructing a large base plane that has trims on it is able to do it.

- Michael