Extrude on Curve

Here’s a quick demo of how to do this.

  1. create your profile, leave it at the origin for ease of use…

  2. Create your curve…

  3. Select the profile and give it a curve modifier. Try the various alignments to see which one is correct… you can switch anytime though. The important thing is to see that the profile has jumped to the beginning of the curve.

Is there any more to this??

Yea, That’s it? So what’s next? Just extrude? Will a blender veteran chime in here? lol

Okay can’t add any more images to the first one…!
Here’s the rest of it :

  1. Make sure you click the last two buttons in the modifier that allows you to see the modifier and edit the cage in edit mode! Then E to extrude, and drag. You will see the shape extrude along the curve! Is that magic or what.


  1. repeat as needed. Note that you can make the extrusion more dense near turns by simply dragging less between extrusions.


  1. The extrusion follows the turns of the curve. You can edit the curve later - or step out of edit for the mesh, edit the curve and go back to extruding.


This is IMO a lot less complicated than trying to fit something to curve. You can edit the extruded mesh afterwards, in place with those two buttons pressed… although this can be little wild.

If any moderator wants to tidy this mess up in any way please feel free to do so, even up to deleting the whole messy thread! I have messaged the two question posters here with the link to the forum thread the original posts were in.

very cool. Thanks Druban

Nice. I want to animate the handles now.

Blender had an easy way to extrude along a curve by using the Bevel Object ( must be a curve also ) ::

http://im78.gulfup.com/jvz71b.jpg

And you can Taper the result with another curve using Taper Object

I think the benefit of this tutorial was how to create a clean mesh, rather than what bevel + curve + convert to mesh gives you.