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I'm somewhat new to blender, and I've asked Google in every possible way to find an answer to this, but I'm stuck. My intention is to design a simple cable clip to 3D print. The cylinders represent the cables and are only there as reference. I'm trying to "wrap" the flat piece around them, using proportional editing to get a nice curve. I want to be able to both move and rotate that plane around and over, but I can only seem to do either one or the other, never both simultaneously.

It's extra frustrating because I also do sculpting in VR, and it's so simple to just grab the one end, and move it where I want while simply rotating my hand, all in one motion. I'm about ready to just go do it in VR, because it would take a few short minutes, while I've been here for almost an hour in Blender trying to figure this out. But it just seems like something that I should be able to do, and I'd like to know how for future reference as I plan on doing a lot more design in Blender for 3D printing in the future.

I'm guessing there's some kind of modifier I can use, but I was hoping to just be able to hit a key on the keyboard or roll my mouse wheel so I can perform both different actions at once. I've attached an image that will hopefully give you an idea of what I'm struggling with. Any help is greatly appreciated!

enter image description here

Sky
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    Have you considered a different workflow, like using a curve to define the shape and then letting Blender generate the rectangles? – user253751 Jan 07 '21 at 00:27
  • maybe? https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/137554/how-to-create-reeling-spool-effect and https://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/50396/how-can-i-animate-a-mesh-moving-in-a-spiral-fashion – susu Jan 07 '21 at 00:48
  • The bend tool might help, though I don't know how to run it. – TheLabCat Jan 07 '21 at 01:02

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I strongly recommend user253751 suggestion. You should build this with a curve instead. You can do this in many different ways, but probably the best for you is using the curve's own extrusion properties. here is a little info on how to make curves 3D, but there's more in the curve editing chapter as a whole, which I recommend reading from beginning to end. Hope this helps!

TheLabCat
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  • Yeah, I never knew about the curve tool. Just getting started with it now, watching some youtube videos, but I'll definitely look at those links now that you've shared them. I have experience with vectors in Illustrator, but they're not behaving quite the same. They're not even behaving the way they do in the videos, so I'm missing something. Back to the drawing board! I'll get back to you all once I wrap my head around the curves. – Sky Jan 07 '21 at 01:19
  • Ok, so I'm starting to try working with curves, I've got the general idea down, but for some reason, instead of my shape uniformly curving around the curve I've made, it stays aligned in its specific position. What I mean is, when the curve makes a 180 and goes back towards where it starts, the mesh "folds" instead of curves. I'm hoping there's a simple checkbox to change this? But I don't know where it is in the object data menu.

    here's an image of what it's doing

     – Sky Jan 07 '21 at 02:25
  • Ouch, yeah, that looks bad. Okay, lets see. How are you deforming the mesh? what modifier are you using? – TheLabCat Jan 08 '21 at 00:52
  • Curves can actually generate their own geometry without a mesh. Check that out in the curve data tab in the properties editor. – TheLabCat Jan 08 '21 at 00:54
  • Not sure I'm fully understanding what you're asking. I'm not using any mesh. The shape being conformed was nothing more than a simple rectangular plane. From that perspective, the way it's shaded, it looks rounded. But it's perfectly rectancular from another angle. – Sky Jan 08 '21 at 05:38
  • I've looked into what the curve generates on its own in the beveling section. It's just too beveled for me though, I'd prefer something more square. It's too bad there aren't multiple options.

    You've set me on the right path though. I think I'm going to look more into making curves as the corners of what I want, then just exruding out from there. So instead of a mesh following a curve, I'll use multipe curves to create the skeleton of the shape. Still feels like a lot more steps than what I thought I would need, but I'm coming at it from a more analog angle because of my VR sculpting

     – Sky Jan 08 '21 at 05:42
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    I appreciate your help! – Sky Jan 08 '21 at 05:42
  • A) A mercedes is a car, and the plane thing is a mesh :D B) I wanted that too, thankfully there's a much simpler answer. Check out the Solidify modifier: it works on curves :D – TheLabCat Jan 08 '21 at 20:06
  • Tried the solidify, nothing seemed to happen. But I took a different approach to the curves today, and it worked out. Turns out, there's a weird quirk with Bezier curves that I didn't see in any videos or documentation (though admittedly that was a skim). The curve always started out way too big for what I needed, and shaped along the wrong axis I was working on. So I used the rotate, scale, and move tools for the entire curve to "rough it in" before I started working with it. Turns out, that warps the final result out of shape. Oops. – Sky Jan 08 '21 at 23:44
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    Once I realized that, I started from scratch, and quite quickly got the result I was looking for, just using a single bezier curve, and a plane as a curve to create the box shape. I'll definitely be using this method a lot in the future, so thanks again for the suggestion!

    Here's a link to a photo of my current result. I'll still tweak it a bit more to polish it for printing, but essentially this is exactly what I wanted!

     – Sky Jan 08 '21 at 23:46