From: [email-masked] (Gonzalo Garramuno)
To: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 8 Apr 1996 01:17:50 -0700

Frank Aalbers answered to:

>lightwave ([email-masked]) wrote:
>       
> l>  Sure.  Imagine a long RECTANGULAR wire.  TWIST the straight wire 270 
> l> degrees.  Now BEND it into a hoop.

>Twisting while extruding is sadly not possible with LW . In Imagine for
>example this would be a piece of cake .

>I tryed motion Path , its not possible .

Actually, there is a way.  If you have patience and are willing to spend
the time (I don't.  I have Imagine for this sort of thing).

Ok.  Here's the solution I can think of:

Create your square in Modeler and save it with its center at 0,0,0.  Now
create your curve.  Do not make it a closed curve (don't merge the first
and last point).  You ARE going to be using Path2Motion so, you might want
to actually freeze the curve first, remove polys and create the curve
again, to avoid Path2Motion's linear problem.... or get your text editor
handy and change all 1s to 0s as it was shown here previously.

Now, in Layout, bring your cube and add a null object.  Parent the cube to
the null.  Now, load the motion file to the null.  Check that it is
correct.  If it is not, go into Modeler again, make any changes and repeat
the steps above.
Now, for the null set Align to Path to ON.
So far, we have a the null and square going around in the loop and
turning, following its shape.  Scale the motion as you see fit (so that
the square draws the curve, without taking giant steps).
Now, go to your cube and set to keyframes: one at 0 and one at your last
frame and keyframe your bank rotation (in your example, 0 to 270).
Okay.  Now, we have the square doing what you want: twisting, following
the path and turning around.

However, we need to make this thing solid.  This is the ugly step here.
Now, we need to go to use Save Transformed for the square and save as many
versions as you have frames (from 0 to your last frame minus one).  Let's
say you end up with 30 versions of the square.

Now, we go back to Modeler, and in an empty layer we load all those
squares.  Now, we have to select each one in order and apply Skin on them.

Voila!  Four hours later... you get the object you were looking for.

Gonzalo Garramuno
[email-masked]
Buenos Aires, Argentina