creating pipe from curve - Video tutorial.
 

Please see image for what I want to be able to do with curves - easily and effectively, like in 3D studio max (which is where i made what is shown). In max its as simple as clicking "display in viewport" for the curve options and then choosing the number of sides and the width. Maya is giving me a headache with this one though!

I realize there are two methods that produce similar results, specifically, extrude & extrude face along curve, but they don't produce anywhere near the results I want.

The problems with extruding a curve is that
1. I have to make an object to extrude with (ie, a circle for a rounded pipe), or a triangle for a triangular pipe (which is freaking annoying to create..)
2. combining angular curves with smoothed curves can't be done so I'd have to do the extrude on multiple pieces of curve.

The problem with extruding a polygon face along a curve is that you can only choose the number of divisions - the divisions won't appear on corners.

Are there any other ways of doing this? Am I missing something??

Thank you for your help!

It looks like their isn't an easy way to do this.

Here is a video demonstration of the best way I found. Hope it is useful to others having the same problem I did!

http://www.vtutorials.com/maya/createTubeFromCurve.wmv

nice link kavelle, I've been experimenting with tubes and needed to do just that. The next step I have is to gradually taper the resulting tube which I would imagine could be done with a mel script.

For a simple taper you can mess with the "Scale" setting in the "extrude" node of the resultant surface.