Wonky Nurbs Curve Pathing?

[LarryO]

What is it that I am not understanding about nurbs curve pathing? There are two straight lines, one long and one short (75mm) at the terminal end. They were joined together as nurbs with the compose command and as a path look just fine but generate this wonky mid-rail as seen in the screen capture. Path is shown in the second image.

[cberg]

Just curious. Is your 3d conversion Res set to high?

 

 

 

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

There could be a few reasons.  Off the top of my head, I would go to the 3D Power Pack module and select rebuild curves.  Rebuild will smooth out the curve.  Add points if necessary.

[LarryO]

44 minutes ago, VIRTUALENVIRONS said:

There could be a few reasons.  Off the top of my head, I would go to the 3D Power Pack module and select rebuild curves.  Rebuild will smooth out the curve.  Add points if necessary.

The wonky curving appearance is the undesirable amusement park look that was generated from the long straight segment of the path. The short 75mm horizontal segment at the bottom end is to transition the rail with a mitered look to horizontal, aligning the mid-rail with the adjacent landing's mid-rail on this ramp.

 

1 hour ago, cberg said:

Just curious. Is your 3d conversion Res set to high?

Yes.  And ortho projection.

[LarryO]

I was able to fix the problem easily enough by converting to 3d poly, ungrouping the result and then recomposing as a 3d poly line. At which point exiting edit mode changed the path back into a nurbs curve by the Extrude Along Path coding and the path was correctly rendered as straight segments.

But was using Compose to join those two nurbs curves an unsupported technique and the reason why it generated that amusement park railing?

[zoomer]

2 hours ago, LarryO said:

look just fine but generate this wonky mid-rail as seen in the screen capture.

 

 

Maybe that is the reason why the railings from the Stair Tool also look so wrong and crippled.

Also the Stringers are usually at wrong heights around the Landings ....

 

I also do not get why VW has to 3D Poly Paths to NURBS Curves in EAPs.

Especially for extremely simple Paths like for attic coverings, NURBS are so much more

tedious to manipulate.

Usually, unfortunately I avoid EAPs completely and workaround with simple Extrudes

or Generic Solids.

 

But I think it is already on VW's Radar that EAP is one of these ancient legacy Tools

that need some love.

(But where to start and what priority)

[VIRTUALENVIRONS]

I don't think extrude along a path can work unless it is a NURBS curve.  The fact that VW's has two functions that do the same thing (Loft>one rail) is the give away.  The 'Extrude along a path" is similar to the first Windows operating system.  It essentially sat over DOS and made everything work like a Mac, but the underlying technology was DOS.

Extrude along a path is similar, it just gives you editing features not available (yet) in the 3D NURBS module.  If you notice that whatever you use to make a path originally, it always becomes a NURBS curve in edit.

Although I always use "Extrude along a path", I am always aware of how the transformation from either a line, polygon, polyline, etc. to NURBS curve will be.  It will be like "covert to nurbs", so you get points bunched up and then gaps.  When points get bunched up, you get curves like the railing in this thread.

Normally the "Reshape Tool" can fix any problem.