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Spline Cleaner: Detach Splines, Connect Segments, Weld Vertices

This Spline Cleaner tutorial dives into 3 essential functions — Explode, Connect, and Weld — to help you organize complex spline shapes, detach segments, and optimize vertices for cleaner results in your 3ds Max projects.

With Explode, you can detach all segments or splines within selected shapes, with the option to group segments by angle threshold. Weld Vertices allows you to merge vertices within a set distance, reducing unnecessary points. Finally, Connect Vertices enables you to join nearby vertices by creating new segments to fill up unwanted gaps in your curves.

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Spline Cleaner: Optimize, Normalize, Reduce vertices

Here’s a video showing a quick overview of the most important tools in Spline Cleaner for removing excessive vertices from your spline curves: Optimize, Normalize and Reduce Vertices.

Update: The Normalize tool was greately improved in version 1.50 with the addition of Smart Normalize feature, wich rebuilds the spline/s without loosing any detail at the corners.

Visit our SplineDynamics channel on Youtube for more videos.

Cheers!

 
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Spline Cleaner: Managing and Fixing Curves Efficiently

Here are 2 short and essential videos showing a quick overview of Spline Cleaner‘s Filters tool and the Splines Info Dialog, to easily manage, diagnose, find and solve common errors on your curves.

This tutorial explores the filtering capabilities of the Spline Cleaner plugin. Learn how to select, attach, detach, or delete spline curves quickly and precisely using smart filters like size, length, proximity, and more. Spline Cleaner’s Action by Filter feature allows you to perform these actions with nine different filters, each with customizable parameters. You can also choose to act on entire shapes or subobjects and use reference shapes to streamline tasks.

Learn how to identify and fix common spline issues in 3ds Max using the powerful diagnostic tools in the Spline Cleaner plugin. In this tutorial, you’ll discover how to use the Splines Info Dialog to view detailed data about your splines in real time and monitor any changes. With the Make Diagnosis feature, you can detect and address overlapping duplicates, double splines, overlapping vertices, and empty shapes, ensuring clean and optimized spline geometry.

Visit our SplineDynamics channel on Youtube for more videos.

Cheers!

 
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Spline Cleaner: Quick Start Tutorial

Welcome to Spline Cleaner, a set of powerful tools for cleaning, repairing and organizing spline curves in Autodesk 3ds Max!

INSTALLATION

  1. Unzip the content of the .zip file and then drag the “.mzp” file onto one of your viewports in 3ds Max . The plugin automatically installs itself.
  2. A dialog called “Software Activation” pops-up. Enter your license key in the text field. (You received 2 license keys by email when you purchased the product).
  3. If the license key is correct, Spline Cleaner will start.
  4. To add the plugin to a toolbar, go to the Menu > Customize > Customize user interface…
  5. Go to the “Toolbars” tab and pick the category “Spline Dynamics”.
  6. The plugin’s name, “Spline Cleaner”, must be listed there. Just drag it onto a toolbar and you’re done!

SPLINES INFO DIALOG

This plugin comes with an interactive tool called the Splines Info Dialog, wich displays very useful information about the selected shapes/splines.

We strongly recommend you to keep this dialog open everytime you manipulate spline curves to have an instant feedback about their changes.

  1. Draw some splines and shapes  in your 3dsMax scene.
  2. Convert them all to Editable Spline (most of Spline Cleaner operations requiere Editable Splines to work. Otherwise you’ll get a warning message)
  3. Select the splines and open Splines Info Dialog (the topmost button).
  4. You’ll see there all the splines info: no. of shapes selected, no. of splines, segments, vertices, spline length, and more.
  5. Click the button Show/Hide Vertex Ticks to display all the spline vertices/knots.
  6. Make changes to the splines, add, delete and move vertices. Then re-select the splines or change the selection to update the splines info.

This tool can also make a diagnosis of possible errors on your splines, such as overlapping duplicates, double splines, overlapping vertices and empty shapes.

TOOLS, ROLLOUTS & QUICK HELP

If you scroll down the plugin’s interface (UI), you’ll see there are more tools and other rollouts.

The main tools are in the first rollout. In the rollout named More Tools there are some complementary tools, such as Flatten Splines.

In the rollout Basic Parameters, you will be able to change the basic parameters of all the selected splines at once. Try it!

On the right of every tool’s title there’s a question mark icon. When you place the mouse pointer over this icon, a tooltip with help appears. If you click it, in most of the cases, a dialog pops-up showing an extended help.

FIRST STEPS

To start trying the plugin, you can play arming and disarming shapes with many splines. You can do it very fast with Spline Cleaner.

Draw some shapes and splines and create some duplicates to have a bunch of curves. Use the tools Splines Info Dialog, Attach Selected, Explode and Weld Vertices to see how powerful this plugin is.

We hope you enjoyed Spline Cleaner. Check for more tutorials on this site!

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