Go to Create
CV Curve Tool
Option Box and reset the settings.
In the Front view create a curve, starting
in the origin, with 5 units between each CV
point. Hold down the x key on your keyboard
when placing the CV's to snap to the grid.
For this tutorial I will use a total of 6
CV points.
Then go
to Create
NURBS Primitives
Circle
Option Box. Reset the settings and
hit Create.
With the Nurbs Circle selected, shift select
the curve. Enter the Modeling
menu set and go to Surfaces
Extrude
Option Box. Reset the settings and
hit Extrude.
You should now have extruded the circle along
the curve you made in step 1.
Grab the
Nurbs Circle and move it about 3 units in
the x axis. The extruded surface will move
as well because of contruction history, but
it's important that you ONLY move the circle.
In the circle's outputs you'll have an extrude1
node. Click it to expand it and set Use
Component Pivot to Component
Pivot and Use Profile Normal
to off. Nothing will happen
yet, but it will when you increase the Rotation
value.
Speaking of the Rotation value. Try setting
it to 360. Now the extruded surface will make
a spiral that goes one time around the curve.
If you try moving the circle along the x axis
you will see that its position will increase
the circumference of the spiral.
Keeping the circle in positive 3 in the x
axis will give you a result like the image
to the right.
Now try
setting the Rotation value of the extrude
to 5000. The extruded surface
will now rotate about 14 times around the
curve. A problem though is that it's looking
a bit flat. To fix this problem you should
rotate the circle 90 degrees in the
x axis.
And that is, as they say,
that. Now just play with the settings of
the extrude1 node, try moving, scaling and
rotating the nurbs circle for different
results.
For a phone cord for instance; Try scaling
the nurbs circle down a bit, and moving
it closer to the curve. If you want the
cord to have a more rectangular cross section
just tweak the CV's of the circle.
After some fast tweaking I came up with
this result.
Happy modeling!
If you are
interested; here is
a zip'ed scene-file used in the tutorial.
You can download WinZip from winzip.com
to unpack it. Enjoy! :)
A 2.38min
video tutorial for this spiral tutorial
is available in Microsoft Video 1 codec. It's
a 2.33MB download in Rar format. Go to rarlabs.com
and download WinRAR to unpack it.
Extra:
Try pulling the CV's in the curve you made
in step 1. The spiral will stretch like a
regular phone cord.
Nice huh? :)
CV Curve Tool 
