EASY SPRING CREATION IN MAYA?!?!
 

Hello,

I was wondering what's the easiest way to do a spring and gain control on it in maya is - Studio max has a default spring creator which is very well implemented and I don't understand why Maya doesn't have this as a primitive.

At the moment, what I am doing is Rotating and Translating a circle and then lofting that to get the spring. However doing it this way makes it unscalable. If I want to flatten the spring (not for animation) but just to shorten the distance between coils, it deforms the circle into oval which is not what happens in reality or what I want.

I could adjust the circles translation to get what I want but its so incredibly hassly and stupd for something so simple.

Anyone?

Thanks

step 1
create a cylinder whith as many isoparms as control you want. dont forget to MAKE IT LIVE because youre going to
step2
Create a CV curve in spiral along the surface of the cylinder using snap to curve or to point.
Step3
Delete the cylinder
step 4
Create a circle
step 5
Extrude the circle along the spiral.

To compress the spring just scale the spiral and the extruded spring will follow whitout deforming into a ellipse

you can copy the curve and circle creation and the extrusion to a mel script and put an icon in a shelve so that when you want a spring you have it with one click as in Max

(hey i just made my frist tutorial... wasnt that hard) :) :headbang:

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Maya is the best software but it hasnt much presets so you have to know what you want and how to get it...
They could make an addon of presets like the shader library...

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HISTORY, dont delete it until youre sure you wont need it on animation...
also, "i´d kill to work with a good rigger..."

If you take a look at the Tornado FX text tutorial at my site, the first few steps are creating a spiral curve to use for the tornado. That should get the curve fairly easily. Then you can extrude a small circle along the spiral as dragonfx says.

Yipeee
 

sweeto - thanks for the quick response - Top notch. Still reckon it should be a primitive.

I'm going to try making it now :D

I keep forgetting about the script thing.. That is wonderful.

THANKS!!!! x abazillion

okaaay
 

Okay,

the technique worked a treat although while the mel script allows me to replicate what I've done again, there is still no control over the number of coils/loops. If you made 8 by using the isoparm technique, you end up with 8 because that's how you made it. This is linked to the cv that is used for extrusion. I'll look into the script a bit and see what I can come up with although I'm not a mel person.

There are LOTS of "coil/spring/spiral" melscripts freely available at Highend that allow full history, and controll over dynamic "turn" controls.

i.e, you can ad as many turns as you want by MM-click-n-draging an attribute in the channelbox.

...however, a primitive would be nice too, but to each his own I guess:)