How to use flow to place cross sections along a spine curve Gallery | Download | Sales | Support | Search
		You must know: Curve Drawing (curve) You will learn: Flow Along Curve (flow) How to easily place cross sections along a freeform curve To place the curves: Create a set of cross section curves in the Front view using the curve command. A surface will be created using the cross section curves. The surface will look better if the curves all have the same number of CVs. The easiest way to ensure this is to edit the copies of the first curve.   Make the Perspective viewport current by clicking on the title bar. Turn on Snap and Ortho. Drag two curves along the y axis at their relative positions on the final curve. The distance between first and second cross section is five units, and the distance between second and last ten units. This will define the relative distance of the curves when flow places them on the spine curve. Only the relative distance counts, so it is not necessary to use five and ten, two and four works just as well. Zoom out a little. Turn off Snap and Ortho. Draw a curve that will be used as the spine curve. From the Transform menu, click Flow Along Curve. At the Pick some objects and press ENTER prompt, select the three cross section curves and press ENTER. At the Original backbone curve prompt, type L and press ENTER to specify that you want to draw a line as the backbone curve. At the Beginning point of line prompt, in the Perspective viewport turn on gridsnap to pick the origin. At the Ending point of line prompt, select a point in the plane of the last cross section curve (here that point is 0,15). At the New backbone curve prompt, select the spine curve you drew as the new backbone curve. The cross sections are placed on the curve at their relative distances from each other. From the Surface menu, click Sweep Along Path to create a surface from the curves.
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