I am trying to create a simple wire, with a length of 80, and a thickness of only .017 (Blender units). To give the wire some droop between the two ends, I created a simple parabola, using a bezier curve. I then wanted to use a low-poly bezier circle as the bevel object. For some reason though, the bevel comes out way larger than the circle.
Here are a couple screen shots, that show the objects and all of the settings. In this first image, the circle is selected, to show all of its settings:
But, as can be seen, the resulting bevel is over 10 times the size of the circle (the dark area is the open mouth of the resulting tube). Does anyone know why this is happening? The tube should be the same width as the circle.
Well, I managed to fix this problem. In my first attempt, I started with a short curve, so that I could see the shape of the droop. I the used scaling to stretch the curve to the length that I wanted. That scaling may have caused my problem, even though I used ^A to set the new scaling to 1.0. Have i discovered a bug? Here is what I should have gotten the first time:
Thanks. I did a search on “mean radius”, and I found that I shouldn’t have tried to scale the curve. It apparently causes all kinds of problems, that control-A just can’t fix.
Thanks for the heads-up on the catenary. I had forgotten the formula, and now I see why. Is there a way to plug formulas into Blender curves? But, in reality, my curve was neither a catenary nor a parabola. It was just a three-point bezier, that I used to approximate the curve. Seemed to work OK, to render this scene:
