From the course: Meshmixer: Function and Command Reference

Add Tube - Meshmixer Tutorial

From the course: Meshmixer: Function and Command Reference

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Add Tube

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- [Instructor] This video is on the Make Tube command. Click on edit, and go to Add Tube, and it adds a tube. If just accepting the defaults, you can see exactly what happens. So we scroll around. A hole has been cut from one side of the mesh to another. You could route electronic wires through it, other different things through that hole. I'm going to control z to go back into the tool. These red dots allow you to drag, on your model, where you want the tubes to go, snapping to the faces. So something like this, we would be able to go maybe to the bunny's nose right here, drag this one down to the bottom, and this would be where an electronics bay would be for batteries, or an LED controller going up to an LED, so that you could put a little LED in this bunny's nose. Control z to get back into the tool. So there's different options. If you look at this, we'll zoom in a little bit here, AutoRoute Smooth makes this a smooth transition. Compare that to AutoRoute Minimal, and you can see that there are some harder breaks in there. We can kind of move this like this and see. If we were trying to route a wire up through this, it would be fine until it got here, and that would be kind of hard to make that corner. So AutoRoute Smooth tries to make it a little bit more smooth, and you can adjust that with collision radiuses to make it go away from the skin of the model as much as possible. The length means get there as quickly as possible, or take your time, go around the model a little bit. You could certainly do that, if you wanted to. Your end radius determines how big your end is. You can make one end much, much larger, or much, much smaller than the rest of your tube. And the radius is the overall radius of how it starts through how it ends, if your end radius is different. So if you have a radius here of three, and an end radius of three, then your tube will be the same size, starting to end. We'll turn this back down to maybe one, and this back down to one. So that's AutoRoute Smooth. If we go to, we'll go from bottom up, Spline (Inside), this is a lot more curve, and we go tangent length here to show you that this is basically on a spline, so a much more known curve that you can use as this drags around, than something that is, not more random but... A little bit harder to predict what this will do based on the outside geometry than something that is absolutely known, which is a spline, which is just a tangent length. So this is Spline (Inside). If we say Spline (Outside), it will go outside your model to the best that it can. So if this is on surfaces here, and we click accept, you will have a tube outside of your model. Click select on this. Make my brush a little bit smaller. Select part of this and delete it. You'll see that this is hollow inside. Going to undo that, and undo until I'm back in the tool. So that's Spline (Outside). Line (Inside) means just go straight from one to the other. So if we bring this up to the nose, and we say, Line (Inside) Boolean, which is essentially subtract, what will happen is a hole will be cut from one place directly to another. This one didn't care if it was going inside the model or out. It cut here, and cut there. Same thing as if we went up here, and said accept, it would start in the model, and just cut all the way through, to put some sort of rod or antenna in there. If we say Line (Outside), it will go outside the model, and add a tube on the outside. So inside cuts, and outside adds a tube. Even if it's going physically inside the model, it's a different modality of this tool. So let's go back to AutoRoute Smooth. So we have an option here for Boolean. I'll make it a little bit easier to see. Boolean will create a Boolean subtraction, so it cuts out of the mesh. Boolean Append will add a tube inside of your model that you could go in and sculpt with any sculpting tools, make my brush a little bit bigger, and the sculpting tools will affect the tube just like the model. Going to undo that. If we go to new object, what will happen when we click accept is now we have a bunny and a tube as a separate object. So we can click on the tube, hit the t key for transform, and move this tube out as a separate object, and do things to it just as you would with a different object. Pretty cool usage there. So that is just an overview of the Add Tube command. It's useful if you're routing things inside of your models, and you can then use the tubes to do sculpting on their own. If you wanted to go in and click on sculpt, and inflate on this tube, you can use the tools just like you would with any other object, and change them, and manipulate them if you wanted. So, an overview of the Add Tube tool.

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