Fluid Toy Project
 

Hello everyone. I'm starting a new project that hopefully I can complete in my lifetime.

I'm trying to model one of those fluid toys that are usually used as corporate giveaways (I've enclosed a picture of the original).

My task is to first model this toy, then attempt the more difficult task of animating the blue ooze that flows down inside.

I'm having trouble getting the "steps" to extrude properly. In my attached pic, you can see that the step isn't quite wrapping straight around the curve, but rather dips towards the outside, plus it looks like a portion of the NURBS square that I used to Extrude around the NURBS circle path has decided to move itself to towards the center of the extruded step.

To make this happen, here are my steps:

1) Created a NURBS curve and used the vertex editing to pull it downward

2) Created a NURBS square and scaled it (did nothing else to it)

3) Reset Extrude tool to default and checked both At Path and Component and performed the Extrude.

Can anyone help me get this extrude to work properly please?

Thx!

OK, I've gone a different route. I created a rectangular path using CV Curves and this worked much better extruding along the path. Only problem is that when I select the openings' Isoparms and perform a PLANAR on them, how do I attach the PLANAR surfaces so that when I move or scale the "ramp" or "step", the PLANAR pieces don't head off in different directions?

Man this is fun...replying to myself. I just read a thread that Mt. McKinley wrote to Bernhard about deleting History to solve this very problem. Worked. Now on to the rest of the modeling...