Question about splines

[Daishichimaru]

We all know how much of a pain in the butt is is to draw complex shapes from splines in MAX. I want to imbed some fairly complex designs into parts of one of my creatures, but I don't have enough time to do it the click-drag way. Would anybody happen to know of a plugin that reads bitmap or vector images and will dump the design into a spline? I'll love you forever if you can point me to one!

[Suneet]

Bitmap or *vector* images did you say? What kind of vector do you want to use, as most should be no problem. When you import vectors as .ai into MAX, they tend not to extrude well because they're all split up into segemts. You can remedy this with some vertex welding. Also, I know Flash MX and Freehand can trace bitmaps and save them as .ai for import into MAX.

Also, I don't think tracing bitmaps by hand is *that* bad. I like to set the initial type and drag type to corner, so everything is blocky when I first do the hand trace. Then I go through all of the verticies and turn them into beziers or bezier corners and move some handles around. Yes, for something big it might take a little while, but you'll get excellent results.

And then, you can also use a NURBS curve. Those aren't as unpredictable as beziers.

[Daishichimaru]

I just threw vector in there because the Macromedia suite can convert to vectors; regular bitmaps are better by far. I heard that several of the CAD programs can sketch a line image from a bitmap ala importing blueprints, so I'm hoping to use that to do it.

I know it's not a huge deal, but it IS boring work that takes a lot of time to do, especially when you're trying to match the curves as closely as possible. And I hadn't thought about using NURBS curves, I usually stay away from those evil tools and objects, but it bears consideration. Danke.