hello everyone.....

trying to accomplish a simple task thats causing me a bit of hangups.

so what i want is a shape created from a cylinder. the first pictures gives you an idea of what the shape is (curve projected in RHINO).

now, i want to make this shape in polys. (the final shape should have a thickness, just like a tube).

but i went ahead and tried a couple of different strategies with nurbs intending to convert to polys since that seemed the most straightforward.

1. i have the precise curve i want, so i tried projecting it in maya, and it gave me all sorts of issues like not being able to trim. i think this was because i was projecting a curve that would surround the surface completely by ensuring my curve was = to the diameter of cylinder and this was causing trouble the curve on surface or something...

after trying some other workarounds, i concluded that nurbs in this case was probably not worth it.... unless anyone knows what im doing wrong. again, such an easy task causing issues.

so on to polys..


2. the only way i can think to create this in polys is to create a cylinder with many vertical segments, and drag the CV's to align with the reference curve in a side view.

is this the only / best way to do it in polys?

and if so, is it correct for me to say that working with poly's will most of the time involve aligning things to a reference curve / image instead of having the precision of nurbs and things like projecting exact curve on the surface......

hope to get clear on this,

thanks!