I am looking for a utility that will allow me to generate things like pipes,
cup/mug handles etc.
An example of the sort of thing I am looking for is Piper by Mike Weber
(http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/8625/piper/piper.html)

This is an excellent utility which allows you to draw a path with Bsplines
using a simple 3d editor and then allows you to "Pipe" the path. The
resulting pipe is a raw triangle mesh. The pipe can be bent around quite
sharp corners without the pipe cross section being "crushed" (the pipe
radius remains fairly constant).

All this is fine but I need SMOOTH pipes without the underlying triangle
mesh showing though. Even converting the data from "raw" "raw smoothed" did
not help much.

All this would seem to point to using Bezier patch type objects (say  a
cylinder type patch in Moray or Spatch) and then bending and stretching this
into shape using rotations & translations etc.

The problem with this is it's tricky to keep the "pipe" diameter constant
after all that bending & stretching.
It ends up looking more like ribbon then pipe!

Any Ideas? Do I just have to "tough it out" with patch editors or has
someone written something like Piper but for patch type cylinders?

As a newbie this is my first post, so be kind.
(Or I might regret "piping up" :-)  )

Regards,
Paul Brown (New POVer)

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