Draw a ribbed tube?

Hi All.
I have drawn a Vacuum and the steel tubes but can’t find a way of drawing the plastic ribbed hose to connect them both! attached is a section of what i’m trying to achieve. Any help or advise would be greatly apreciated.

there is an extension that could be used…

Helix along Curve

john

The corrugations on some of those hoses are spirals and some are just rings. The extension John referenced will work for the former. For the latter, you could make one ring+valley pair using followme to lathe a profile, then assemble a collection of them into a straight hose. Finally use one of Fredo6’s extensions to bend the assembly around the curve. You will likely have to scale up the model while bending to avoid issues with small faces not forming.

Wow thanks folks give me a while to give each a go. :slight_smile:

Here’s an example of modeling a ribbed (not spiral) vacuum hose.
The curved portion accomplished with Chris Fullmer’s Shape Bender extension.

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All u top Sages…
Many thanks. Used the helix tool John refered to and got this perfect result. Thanks again.

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I guess you’ll need my address to send me a new Henry now :wink:

or you could just award a solution tick…

john

Hi all again.
Now I have the way to draw the ribbed tube, is there a simple’ish way of drawing a curved line (for the helix tube to follow). Not sure thats describing what i need…

I have 2 cad drawings one of the vac and another of the steel tubes. I now need to join them with the helix hose.

I have managed to do this to a point using the Arc tool but the joints of the curves don’t look natural. I then attempted to use the Bezier splice plugin which just succeeded in frying my brain!

Any advice?

I would use the Bezier spline tool from Fredo’s BZ_Spline extension. Or maybe one of the other spline tools. What is the curve supposed to look like?

Heres the image, but at some points the curve has kinks in it. I have used Bezier spline but it Fry’s my brain. If you think its the best way of creating the line i’ll keep going with it.

You might use the Arc tool for the first part of the curve coming out of the machine but I think a Bezier curve would be best for the rest of it. I’d probably use a Bezier curve for the entire thing.

Ok thanks DaveR

Good luck.

FWIW, generally, when I want to draw a 3D Bezier curve, I start by drawing a sort of box to fit it into. That helps make it easier to place the control points. Don’t worry about trying to get the curve exactly right on the first try. Put it in and then adjust it by moving the control points. you can add more points if needed by double clicking on the orange lines. Also, by default, the tool makes the curve with 20 segments. Bump it up to maybe 48 segments for a smoother curve. Don’t go crazy on the number of segments, though.

Here you go, I was making it as Dave was writing it.

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And Box beat me to the visual. :smiley:

Here’s mine, anyway.

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