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While working on a small fun project that involved animating splines (Montpellier Tramway Map morph), the limitations of Spline IK and general hostility of spline animation forced me to create my own simple animation-friendly spline control.
Just like the regular helix only with four bezier handles per turn (or more if you would like - you can control that with the Steps spinner) instead of 40 corner-points of the default Helix shape.
Simple multi-point spline approximating the shape of the catenary curve (the shape formed by a hanging rope). Allows for driving the point positions by scene objects, controlling the slack by absolute sag amount or relative to the length of the line between points, randomization of the slack and other options:
The Voxel Mesh Builder, creates a single solid voxel mesh out of any reference object picked. Several filtering options are available to edit the mesh before extracting it. Perfectly usabel for further editing, without the need to clean the mesh first.
