How to create pipes with elbows in Blender 2.8

In many scenes where there are building of tech stuff you will see pipes somewhere.. Turns out that building pipes with nice elbows along their path is pretty easy to do in blender. I’ve seen many different ways to do it but this method is straightforward and flexible.

The method goes like this:

• Build a path by extruding Vertices
• Add Bevels to all the vertices to make nice elbow shapes
• Convert the path to a Curve
• Add Depth to the curve Geometry

That’s it. Here is the step-by-step in Blender 2.83

Add a plane

Go in Edit mode (press Tab), make sure all 4 corner vertices are selected and merge them all

Now extrude the single vertice along the path you’d like (Press E, then move)

When you are done, select all the vertices and hit the “Bevel” tool. There are two things you need to be careful about:

1- The Bevel tool should be set as “Vertex Only”. You can find that in the Tool tab in the property panel.

2- make sure you add a bit more segments (like 5) to have a nice round elbow

Get out of Edit mode and convert the shape into a Curve, in the Object Menu -> Convert to -> Curve from Mesh/Text

Now you can go to the Curve Property in the right panel

Make sure the “Fill Mode” is set to Full.

Then in the Geometry sub menu, find the Bevel sub-sub menu, and adjust the Depth to whatever size you want for your pipe. The Resolution setting makes the pipe smoother but you can use a subsurface modifier to make them super smooth later

And here you go.. With a Subsurface modifier you get very nice pipes