Caveat and better workflow: obtaining a perfect NURBS polysurface is tweaky especially the filetting step and in this wild curve blend system there is often kinking that ruins both the initial Boolean union and then the filetting, not to mention how self-intersecting tubes cannot be self-Booleaned in Rhino. So, simply outputting as a fine OBJ or STL mesh into ZBrush to create a unified skin that is then smoothed a bit rids any kinks and then the magical ZRemesher affords a new quad mesh that T-Splines can smoothly convert to an efficient if somewhat patchwork smooth NURBS polysurface. No worry, with albeit some loss of total elegance.

The kinking is inherent in the basic geometry of fat tubes along tight curves, seen best by arraying many balls along the curve.

Here I used Cocoon in fact, on the NURBS surfaces as meta surfaces, to obtain a smooth mesh for the ZBrush/T-Splines conversion to NURBS.

Boolean unioning separate, quickly produced individual round capped mesh pipes is also possible in relatively cheap 3D-Coat with its voxel system. It's slower than very expensive Geomagic Freeform on initial import as voxels, and import Scale is how you adjust the voxel size, but it's then very responsive and a 3D mouse Space Navigator works well too, better than Freeform. ZBrush lacks 3D mouse support, and cannot handle super fine detail with its own voxel import system that imports a unified skin, not retaining voxels.

Here is how jewellers are enjoying 3D-Coat, which also happens to have a normal Windows interface unlike bizarre "2.5D canvas" ZBrush and it has more straightforward and advanced brush tools than Freeform, similar to ZBrush. It's the epic output of a single programmer, and still lacks the magic of the ZBrush ZRemesher smart direction matching quad output, so useful for converting any mesh to smooth NURBS via smooth T-Splines conversion.

http://3dcadjewelry.com/forum/content.php?204-Boolean-and-Smooth-Rh...

Freeform only two years ago enabled the always present *second* stylus button after a decade of it being a dummy button, freeing your hand from a keyboard rotate key, and pathetically still lacks a flatten brush, so I'm not very impressed with their team. As often as not the tiring 3D haptic arm fights me instead of aids my workflow, and the internals of each seemingly simple command are usually extremely uncooperative and arcane like they are all alpha release versions retained for years.

Animators are moving to 3D-Coat from ZBrush to be able to sculpt in voxels, free of the usual mesh topology chess game and ruinous facet stretching. ZBrush instead now offers various auto-remeshing schemes and a specialized brush to somewhat solve mesh stretching into crude facets, adding with ZSpheres to rough things out minus mesh topology. Neither one offers elegant subdivision modeling like T-Splines or MODO though so have been described as dealing in amateur hour "mesh soup."

Free Autodesk Meshmixer can also create solids but wasn't well behaved with these large arrays of round capped tubes, quite confusing actually too.

Hi, 

I have one question. What am i doing wrong because i can't see any pattern. Only the curves. Or do i need to use simple component - pipe? :)

I see that i have also one error.

Do you have any suggestions?

Cheers 

M.