Corrugated Materials or Drapery

[Kevin McAllister]

I was trying to find a way to improved the efficiency of a 3D corrugated material I modelled for a project. Along the way I discovered some things I though I would share in case they are helpful to others.

The main tip is extruding a NURBS curve using Tapered Extrude from the Modelling Menu and setting the taper angle to zero. I bet many of you have tried using Extrude with a NURBS curve and gotten the illegal objects error message. For whatever reason, Tapered Extrude works. This approach is slightly simpler than using the Loft Surface tool.

The resulting Tapered Extrude is pretty efficient and when converted to NURBS forms a single surface.

Kevin

[bcd]

I had something like this today, and similar but slightly different approach, using the Soft Goods (old curtain) tool you can cmd K to convert to a group, ungroup and Project-Trim.

[Kevin McAllister]

bcd,

I originally started there, but the pleats of the curtain object taper to a straight line along the top edge of the curtain, so the resulting corrugated material is thinner at the top than at the bottom when viewed from the side. Did you find a way to get around this?

Kevin

[bcd]

HI Kevin,

I actually like this look depending on the pleat depth & width.

To make the taper less severe you could exaggerate the height and trim the excess - overly tapered - top portion.

Interesting find with the tapered extrude - it sounds like these two tools are ready to be combined a la the Reshape tool.