Bend a cylinder by its middle

Question

I would like to know if there's a way to bend a cylinder by its middle so that I can have different versions of it with different bend angles (see picture below). It looks like with a Bend modifier it will bend the whole shape, and that's not what I want, but perhaps I missed something. In the picture below I've tested the Array + Curve modifier but it's not controllable enough. I also can do it with bones and Copy Rotation Constraint but I was wondering if there was a different way. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Array modifiers are actually an interesting way of doing this. Start- and endcaps make all the difference.

First I defined the radius with am empty and extruded a circle, rotating it 5 degrees into a wedge around the empty. Then I fitted the start and end cap. Start cap is easy, end cap needs a bit of tweaking.

The rest is another empty that I rotated 5 degrees around the pivot empty to act as Object Offset for the modifier.

Simply adjust the steps in the modifier, duplicate and apply. Pipe factory.

And that's the result:

As long as you don't need a pentagon, the 5° increments will cover most cases.