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TurboSplines Introductory Video Tutorial

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.

 
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TurboSplines: Quick Start Tutorial

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:

  1. Draw or prepare your splines (they will work as paths for Path Deform modifiers)
  2. On TS Creation section, go to Source Paths area and load your paths. They will be listed there.
    (The steps 3 and 4 in the image are not necessary for this example, but you can do them to learn a little more about TurboSplines tools)
  3. Press (RE)BUILD GEOMETRY button. This will create one path-deformed cylinder for every spline. They will look the same as if you created renderable splines. The big difference is this way you can make them grow!
  4. Go to TS Edition section and change the Radius parameter to adjust the width of your meshes as desired.
  5. Go to TS Animation section and change Animation Type to GROW (stretch).
  6. Finally, press CREATE/MODIFY ANIMATION button (at the bottom of the section).

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:

  1. Just start directly with your renderable splines.
  2. With your splines selected, go to the TS Tools section and press Convert from Renderable Splines.
  3. Go to TS Animation section, set the Animation Type to GROW and finally press the big button at the bottom to create the animation.

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.

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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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