Curvilinear Hand Rails

[Ed Wachter]

In our office we've been attempting to create sweeping curvilinear hand rails using Extrude Along Path. We start by snapping 3D loci to the stair nosings and moving them up to hand rail height. Then we connect those with a 3D poly that then becomes the path for an extrude. This all works but the resulting extrude consists of a series of straight segments rather than a smooth fair curve. It seems that Poly Smoothing does not work on 3D polys. The Smoothing commands make control points appear on the polys but we'd like to avoid manually moving individual points unless this is the only way.  Any ideas on how to automatically smooth these 3D polys? Or other approaches?

 

Thanks

Ed

[Christiaan]

Have you tried using a Nurbs Curve instead of 3D Polygon?

[Ed Wachter]

No I have not tried that, until now. That works much better. The NURBS appears to be a self-smoothing curve. Thank you!

 

Ed

[Andy Broomell]

This might not be related to your particular case, but double check under View < Rendering < OpenGL Options that your "Detail" is set to at least "High" if not "Very High".

[Ed Wachter]

Oh yes. Thanks for the reminder. I do need to upgrade that setting for the display of some curvy objects.

 

Ed 

[Andy Broomell]

BTW - the tricky thing about that OpenGL quality level is that it's a setting that saves into Saved Views, meaning if you already have a bunch of saved views, then increase your quality setting, then run one of your Saved Views, it will revert back to the lower quality.

 

I recommend making sure your blank template has it set to High so that it's never an issue on future projects. (I also like to turn on OpenGL edges and Ambient Occlusion under lighting options).