This is an external video tutorial. A great introduction to TurboSplines, created by Jamie Cardoso (renowned author, reviewer, computer artist & technologist)
It’s a quick overview of the main tools and parameters in the plugin, that shows you how fast and easy is to create amazing spline animations and effects with TurboSplines.
Hi guys!
In this tutorial we want to show you how to cut 2D shapes in 3ds Max, in a clean and easy way, using the Shape Cutter tool from Spline Combiner 3dsMax plugin to make the logo in the image above.
In the case of this 3D logo, the three different color regions were required to be separate meshes, to animate them independently.
3ds Max natively comes with a tool for cutting 3D objects called ProCutter (located in Control Panel > Geometry > Compound Objects). You could use this tool to cut an already extruded logo, but that way you end up with an Editable Mesh (or Poly) with a collapsed modifiers stack. You loose the advantage of keeping the extrusion parametric as a modifier.
Using this plugin, you work in a non-destructive way, so you can go back and edit the original shapes/splines if you need to.
Let’s start. Make a new scene in 3ds Max and do the following:
1. With the Text shape tool, type “Rainbow” (or whatever you like) in a viewport, give the text a reasonable size and assign a nice font to it.
2. Draw an arc through the whole word. Then make a copy, using SHIFT+move, and place it below it to build a rainbow arc, like in the first step at the image below.
3. Open Spline Combiner.
4. First, you need to attach both arcs together because Spline Combiner requires the cutter object to be a single shape. So, select both arcs. Then go to the Tools rollout (in the plugin’s UI) and press Attach Selected. Now you have a single shape containing both splines.
5. Go to the Shape Cutter rollout. Press the button Pick Cutter Object and click on the arc shape. Its name appears in the button text.
6. Leave all the checkboxes on. The options Cookie cut for closed shapes and Detach all elements are exactly what we need to get extrusion-friendly shapes.
7. Select both shapes, the rainbow arc and the text. The press APPLY CUTTER.
8. The plugin will take a little time to perform the action. As a result, you will get many single spline shapes (3 or more per each letter). Like in the 2nd step at the above image.
9. Now you need to attach all the shapes by region, considering the 3 regions delimited by the arc shape: top region, middle region and bottom region. So, select all the shapes in the top region, go to the Tools rollout again and press Attach Selected. Repeat the same procedure for the shapes in each region. You will end up with only 3 shapes, like in the 3rd step in the image above.
10. At this point you can delete the cutter object. Delete the arc shape then.
11. Now try to assign an Extrude modifier to the top shape of the logo. If the shape does not extrude well, it means there are some open splines. You need to weld all the vertices properly to get closed splines for the extrusion. So, at the Tools rollout, use the Weld Vertices tool for that. Repeat the process with the other shapes if necessary.
12. To make a 3D logo from a vector shape, you can use either the Extrude or the Bevel modifier. The one in this tutorial was made with Bevel.
13. You should have a now a beautiful 3D logo, composed of 3 meshes. Assign a different colored material to each one and you are ready!
We hope you enjoyed making this practice. If you have any doubts or consultations, you can post a comment down here or write us through the Contact Form.
Cheers!
Welcome to the wonderful world of TurboSplines! 😉
With this quick start tutorial you will learn how to work with this plugin and begin to familiarize yourself with its tools. For that, we will create a simple scene with some growing splines.
You can access the following image from TurboSplines Help section, clicking the Quick Start Tutorial button.
The instructions in the image guides you through the typical steps required to create a “growing splines” animation.
These are basically the steps to follow, even simpler:
Now play your animation and you will see your cables growing.
This is just a quick sample of the power of TurboSplines. Play a while with all the plugin parameters and you will be able to make your scene and animation as complex as you like.
Maybe at some point of this tutorial you wondered this: why can’t I directly animate my renderable splines??
Well, here’s a good news: you can! 🙂
The porpose of this tutorial was to show you an overview of TurboSplines’ workflow, but if you only need to make growing splines, there’s an extremely simple way to do that:
You we’ll get the same result in less steps, leaving to the plugin only the animation part. Then you can modify the meshes with TurboSplines since they will be now TS meshes.
We hope you enjoyed TurboSplines. Check out the other tutorials and videos for further learning.
Welcome to Spline Cleaner, a set of powerful tools for cleaning, repairing and organizing spline curves in Autodesk 3ds Max!
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.
This tool can also make a diagnosis of possible errors on your splines, such as overlapping duplicates, double splines, overlapping vertices and empty shapes.
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.
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!
