khkannisto

Significant progress made, inspired by your input. I realized I could just skip attempting to attach the splines to each other and have the cloned extension spline include the rounding. Now, with cloners, procedural modeling and some xpresso, I've got a sweet setup for this: All I need to do is to draw the flat splines in 2D and literally everything is generated procedurally from that -- neons, including the curved extensions to wall, wall plugs, support structures, and even the connecting cords are all generated automatically with cloners and xpresso. Connecting cords xpresso largely from the HelloLuxx "Attach Spline Points to Clones" tutorial. Cloners are now my new favorite tool in C4D!

With the addition of Fast Spline Connector 2 plugin, the last workaround looks to become viable.

Hi all, A 3D animation artist from Finland. I've been C4D user for 18 months now. I have been doing 3D for still imaging for 20 plus years, and 10 plus in animation. Plenty of background in 3D in various programs from Electric Image and Stratavision, to DAZ and Bryce 3D, some in 3dsMax, some Maya, lots of Element 3D, a detour through Keyshot and now practically all in Cinema 4D. R20 permanent license with Redshift and xParticles. Initial training mostly through GSG(+) tutorials and courses. I mostly do work for industrial design companies for marketing and presentation purposes. Latest showreel below, includes stuff done in C4D, Element 3D and Keyshot. Great to be here, sounds like the place to be for deeper dive into the software. Plenty more to learn! Best regards, Kalle Voyant Pictures 2020 showreel on Vimeo

Another nerdy workaround: 1) Select points to be extruded 2) Split them as separate points (at which they become two-point spline segments) 3) User cloner set to use above object vertices to clone a separate extension spline onto each point 4) Connect and delete with original object 5) Join segments at each point, as they remain disconnected Again, rather minimal improvement.

Currently my best alternate procedure is: 1) Duplicate spline and offset the copy back in Z 2) Reverse (spline points) sequence on the copy 3) Connect and delete original and offset copy to a single spline 4) From front view select some points in a single letter and join segments, which creates a connection between the front and back copy 5) Repeat 4 for each letter 6) Select the back copy points, shrink selection and delete 7) Select all splines and move down (spline point) sequence, which moves the gap in the spline in the right position Rather minor gain from doing each point separately.

Not that the script would be doing anything too complex: Adding a straight spline segment to every start and end point of a spine with a given z offset. Still, I don't think I'll be attempting that for my first C4D script.

Hi guys, Thank you for the suggestions. It seems my simplified example mislead you. The purpose there was just to answer the question "why would anybody want to extrude multiple points". The usual starting point for the neons is lettering, made in Illustrator and imported into Cinema. I thought of the route of extruding, making editable, extracting edges and deleting the unneeded edges. The issue is that with splines, you end up with a humongous number of extra and unnecessary vertices with anything that has curves in it, as you can see from the attached image, before and after the procedure. I guess the best approach would be a script, but that looks like a whole different story. Been at least 15 years since I last wrote anything in Python.

Hi, Trying to streamline a step in modeling neon signs, as I have a whole bunch of these to do. Is there a way to extrude multiple spline end points in one go to get from step 1 to step 2 in the below sequence? Currently I do this one point at a time, using control-drag on axis with the last end point selected. If I try to do the same with even two points selected, new splines are created between the two separate splines. Extrude doesn't seem to do anything on points. I can easily chamfer the point all in one go in step 3 and create the tubes with sweep in step 4, but step 2 is manual, one by one. The splines are all one object. Thanks, Kalle