MaxScripts Tools
rpaul@purdue.edu

Spiral /helix drawing tool

Draws spirals and helixes my own special way. This plug-in was inspired years ago by a student, Kate Osborne, who needed to draw a spiral in AUTOCAD! I made a quick spiral drawing lisp routine for AUTOCAD and later moved it to MaxScript. The chair represented in the floater was made using the original Lisp routine.

Here are some examples of what can be made. They are all 3d curves. The " teeth" on the curve can be made to "wiggle" forward, back, up and down.


Helix threaded surface (screw) generator

With a little extra effort the helix generator was modifed to generrate "screw" surfaces where you can control

taper and pitch.

The radius of the cone and other variables are controlled by using control curves. This method of making a cone has interesting possibilities beyond the StudioMax cone primitive. This surface can have wiggle like the curves above.


Surfacer Shape Tesselator

Given any surface of made of polygons, Place a give shape on the surface in such a way that the shapes interlock.

This is a script in progress. Notice how the shape is scaled to fit each polgon.


Surface Object Painter

This works like the scatter function in StudioMax only the object scattered are scaled to, and replace the polygons of the original object. The scatter object is actually stored as a DXF file that is read in to Max. This provides for mixing any number of scattered objects, in a sequence, or randomly based on what file is read from a family of files you select. You can literally paint a surface with any number other objects. The scatter files can include faces, circles, lines and plines. The files can be made in StudioMax or AutoCad. The image below shows a simple scatter object placed on 1/4 of a torus. Notice that the object can occupy the interior as well as the exterior space.

Another example with the DXF object painted red.


Contact me if you are interested in downloading any of these script tools.

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