How to give edges a thickness?
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Let's say I have a volume defined by edges only (I erased the faces) and that I want to make its edges solid. Is there a plugin for giving edges a thickness? It would be even better to be able of choosing the shape that is used for the extrusion. I know I could use the follow me bu tselecting the whole set of edges won't do and working on separate sub-paths would lead to a huge time waste and give overlapping meshes where the follow-me surfaces of different paths cross. Any idea guys?
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Profile Builder: http://www.smustard.com/script/ProfileBuilder
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Thanks for the fast response Thomas! I'm going to give it a try and post my impressions.
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It's payware, but worth it. I use it often when I work with profiles. Lots of pre-bundles shapes, and very easy to create new libraries.
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I'll happily buy it if it will do what I need
Do you think it can also manage a situation like this one?
As you can see in the highlighted part some vertices of the structure are part of more than two egdes.
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In those cases it will make each line segment individually I'm afraid.
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Too bad, though I can see a lot of power in that plugin and I could buy it the same. Working on separate edges will create a lot of weird overlapping, just like with the vanilla follow-me.
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It does in fact use FollowMe under the hood. But the power is that it's parametric so you can go back and edit the path or profile at any time.
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What about Lines to Tubes by Didier Bur, or Pipe Along Path, or Tube Along Path--Pipe and Tube by TIG? Bur's will allow individual groups for each individual segment on the line/curve. Lot of cleanup though. Finished profile can be 3 faces or more on all three scripts. And of course possibly Latticizer, by TIG? If this is what you mean by thickness.
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Hi mitcorb, I tried some of them and no one can produce proper result with the situation in the screenshots - they all break where the 3 edges meet. Pipe Along Path is not processing the request , it complains because the edges are not a valid path. It could be I did something wrong when using the plugins, or maybe none of them is intended for this scenario.
The best results I got are the ones using Follow Me on various sub-paths and then intersecting and cleaning the mesh, which is still a viable choice if the mesh is simple but it becomes a no-no when things get too much complicated!
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