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.