Spiral corrugate steel pipe?

[patricks]

What would be the best way to model a spiral corrugated steel drain pipe, the kind that are usually 12" up to several feet in diameter?

[christo4robin]

Patrick,

I think if you really want it to be accurate, you'll need to model it in a 3D program that supports more complex modeling than Revit, Rhino, Form Z, etc., then import it back in.

You might also do a search on posts by Phil Read - he is the master of complex family geometry and you may be able to apply some of his tricks to make this happen natively in a Revit family.

[tomnewsom]

Can you make a staircase in any direction? Because the only spiral family I can think of is a spiral staircase, which you might be able to tweak...

[blads]

Why can you do a sweep or part revolve from a corrugated profile?

[Mike Hardy-Brown]

Greetings Patrick,
I did something simlar using a sweep profile, as King Blads suggests.
Have a look HERE and HERE

[patricks]

Why can you do a sweep or part revolve from a corrugated profile?

I don't want just corrugated, but spiral corrugated. I suppose I could do a sweep around a sloping path for half the pipe and copy that along the length, and then do a separate sweep around a path sloping the other direction for the other half. That's the closest thing I can think of.

Unfortunately I would have to do it separately for each size of pipe I have (2 sizes in my current project).

For now I'm just representing the spiral corrugations in elevation with a model surface pattern of lines sloping at a 5 deg. angle to horizontal.

[paul.rawcliffe]

Hi Patricks, did you ever get anywhere with that?

[david_peterson]

Best thing I can thing of is a blended sweep.
Offset the Profile in the Y direction along a curved path.
This will keep the profile square to the world.
If you try this along a sloped path (say by curved object) the profile will start to twist inward along the curve.