Extruding (flexible) pipe along a path

Goodmorning,

I am a first time user of Bongo, stil experimenting, and we were wondering if it would be possible to draw / extrude / pull a flexible pipe along a long curve. Any help would be most welcome, we are currently trying to solve this by multiple (1 meter) segments, connected, but this does not seem to work (yet).

Please let me know if there is a possiblity to do this. Kind regards,

Ties

If you want to pipe to flex/move you can use the morphing -feature on the curve you used to create the pipe from (remember to have Record History on when creating the pipe from the curve).

If you want the pipe to “grow” along the curve here’s a few old posts on how to do that:
http://discourse.mcneel.com/t/animated-object-flowing-along-a-path/3649
http://discourse.mcneel.com/t/path-trace/17344

Thank you, it appears to be working as we would like to have it. As discussed by others, an automatic ‘sweep’ function which grows in an animation would be a nice addition. Thank you for the support :).

Good morning again,

In a subsequent question, we try to visualize spooling (a rotating pivot around which a cable is rolled, similar to an extension cord roled on a hub) Experiment Spooling.3dm (96.4 KB). I managed to work in a similar way with the extruding a flexible pipe along a path, but I cant seem to lock the rotating circle (end of cable) on a certain axis (in this case, the x-axis), so the spooling looks less chaotic (see example).

I hope you can help me :slightly_smiling:

Kind regards, Ties

What exactly do you mean by “lock the circle on a axis”?
And why is the path (Object 0) rotated, till halfway?

I hope you are not taken ill.
Rereading your question I realized I was somewhat confused by you model (and terminology). Hence my questions. Now I think I understand what you are up to.

To make the circle (end-of-the-cable) move along a World-axis, instead of ‘Simple Constrain’ it to the spiral and add some trickery, it can better be simply given Position keyframes, making it translocate along the World’s X-axis. When you think it through its motion must be linear in space as well as in time (as long as the rotation of the spiral is linear in time), since you use an Archimedean spiral.
The spiral had 10 turns while you let it rotate 14 times (-2520° till +2520°). In order to facilitate the synchronization of spiral and end-curve, I altered the rotation in 0° to 3600 (10*360).
Experiment Spooling 001.3dm (356.6 KB)

The synchronization can even be enhanced by using an ‘Expression’ to make the end-curve move aside.

This way its movement is relative to the speed and direction of the rotation of the spiral. Hence it is easy i.e. to make the reel enroll and unroll in one go, or alter the rotation tweening

to make the rolling speed of the cable itself linear instead of exponential.
Experiment Spooling 002.3dm (475.1 KB)

Finaly in Experiment Spooling 003.3dm (344.7 KB) things get somewhat more realistic.
The spiral is truncated in the center because a start of the ‘cable’ at the very center is not only unrealistic, it also gives a distortion of the beginning of the cable.
A shrinking leading-segment is added.
The cable ends are capped.

Not ill, working very hard in making this work. Your tip around the rotation-speed is very interesting, I will take it into account in the next version. I have to render a recent version of our work to show you the current status. Thank you very much for the tips. :slightly_smiling:

I will be back in the air asap

As promised, the current situation of my work. I still have to implement the rolling speed of the cable linear (instead of exponential).

What you see here is the cable being brought in, and two layers of cable stacked: the first from the inside out, the second from the outside in.

If you have any questions, drop me a line. in due time I will make an update (but I have to focus on other stuff first…)