Hey folks so I’m following a tutorial but as usual, I’m going off-reservation with my own ideas, I want this bannister to sweep down and round but when I try the follow me it twists it in a funky way, is there a good extension that will perhaps give me the option of a start and end shape or orientation options?
TIA
Ben 
Curviloft, maybe?
Eneroth upright extrude
In addition to Steve’s suggestion of Eneroth Upright Extruder, do the entire railing run on on extrusion.
yeah i was gonna then when it didn’t work I figured id isolate and work on this bit
tried enroth already, perhaps i am not using it right, Ill see if i can find a tutorial on youtube
FredoSpline + Extrusion Tools
this looks good, i was getting close with curviloft, ill play with these methods
do you know if its possible to adjust a curve after drawing?
With Curviloft (and FredoSpline or Vertex Tools for path)
I prefer Upright extruder for this sort of thing.
that looks nice, thanks
its no good im losing my mind over this, I’ve tried all the tools suggested and followed the steps exactly yet mine just goes crazy every time, any chance someone could do an idiots guide with my file or see if I’ve done something wrong
MF bannister.skp (774.8 KB)
Position the path in the middle
with Upright Extruder and Curviloft
Your model is on the edge of the tiny face problem, too many segments in your curves for it to perform well at that size. Perfect candidate for The Dave Method.
One of the benefits of this is you could leave all your tags turned on and simply copy the component outside the building to work on it in open space.
As you see the first try with Upright causes some holes and a mixture of faces, make the path and profile a component, make a copy, scale the copy up, (in this case I only needed to scale up by 10 but sometimes you need to go 100 or even 1000 to get a good result), edit the large one and then you can delete it as the edits are retained in the smaller one.
thats nearly it but it ends up thinner at the top, I need it to start and end on a shape to keep the dimensions I think
If you rotate the profile to the vertical before extruding, both ends are the same.
feel like i might be being stupid but if you were to then slice that at the correct angle wouldn’t it still be squashed, I say that as when I ran the extrude before and it wasn’t right I did have it at that angle and noticed it was squished
I came back and had another look at this, your shape is actually very hard to produce.
Most tools tend to twist it or squash it, I ran through a selection of options and none that I can find just now will give you equal ends (cross section of wood) and a smooth bend without a twist. There probably is the right tool, or someone could probably write one, but I’ve made a hybrid that is almost correct.
By using Upright Extruder to create the bottom section and curve you get a nice smooth untwisted curve, that is slightly squashed at the end, then use Curviloft to join the curve to the end profile and the difference in size will be corrected along the length. Visually it’s very close and to build it in reality would require some bespoke work on the curve anyway.
