Creating Splines, Modifying and Extruding
Creating splines is useful for creating complicated shapes. To do this, simple draw out a spline using on of the many spline types. I'm just going to use a bezier spline to create a custom shape:
When the last point has been drawn, select 'Close spline' in the attributes to create a complete spline.
I then added another simple circle spline at the location where I want the shape to be cut out of the other.
Next we need to add a spline mask, found on the top bar by clicking and holding on the 'array object' button.
Next, we drag both the splines into the spline mask to make them children of the spline mask object. Then all we have left to do is to change the attributes to whichever work for you. To get mine to work properly I had to select 'B subtract A' and then change the Axis to 'ZY'
If we wanted to cut further shapes out of this one, we can do this by right clicking on the spline mask object in the object manager and selecting make editable. This will create a spline that can be altered using point select mode to fine tune the shape. We can then add the next splines we wish to cut out, and dragging both splines into another spline mask object and altering the attributes again.
We can also subtract multiples splines at once by creating all the splines we want to subtract like this example where the squares will be cut out of the circle.
We then need to select all of the shapes to be cut out, so in this example, each of the squares. To do this, we need to make each of the splines editable and then we can right click and 'connect objects and delete'.
This creates one spline from the ones that we have selected and deletes the original splines as they are no longer needed. We then follow the technique we used earlier of creating a spline mask, adding both splines and then changing the spline mask attributes. After doing this we are left with a shape like this:
This shape can then be further modified or added as a child to an extrude object to create a 3d shape from the spline. To do this, create an extrude NURB and then simple drag the spline to the extrude NURB in the object manager.
Then the only thing left to do is to edit the attributes of the extrude NURB to add movement to the corrent axis to make the object 3D. After playing with the attributes we should be left with this: