[3DS8] Corrugated Hose

BDelacroix

Hello everyone.

I am wrestling with another project of mine and I have a need to use a corrugated hose in it. For those who don't know, a corrugated hose is like the lumpy hose one finds on a dryer vent.

There is a hose tool in 3DS Max and it would work well except that I want the hose to conform to a certain path and I can't do that with the tool.

So, I created the hose as a loft along a spline path. To get the corrugated quality I am painstakingly inserting deformation points on the scale setting for the loft object. One at each 0.1% of the line. This is going to be 1000 points to edit. While I am doing this, and it looks good, I am thinking to myself, "There has to be a better way."

I had thought of applying a bump map but have had bad results in the past with the quality of such an application.

So I write here hoping that one of you experts may know of some secret trick to make this task a little easier. Even if there was a way to copy and paste points on the deformation curve editor it would be better than what I am doing.

Coolhand

why dont you try controlling it with a tiled map or gradient... you could use displacement, bump or normal mapping.

BDelacroix

Because of previous bad results using that, but I'm about to try it again anyway. 1000 points hurts.

citizen

Create your hose, then apply the pathdeform modifier.

BDelacroix

Ah, thank you. Now that is a solution. Sorry I didn't know about path deform before.

efritsch

I have a question related to this, and I thought that I would ask here instead of starting a new topic.

I followed this thread, and using the help, I managed to create a hose using loft objects that follows a path that doesn't intersect solid objects. Yay!

Now, my problem. How can I attach the end to two different objects so that when the turret rotates, one end stays attached to the turret and on end stays attached to the base? I tried a regular hose but it ends up going through the solid objects pretty much all the time.

I appreciate any help on this.

[Deleted User]

you might have to use keyframes to keep the hose from going through, like stretch it etc... I think that would be easiest... correct me if im wrong