QUESTION How to make guard rails in Blender

[JBreak]

Hi all, I wanted to ask you about how to best make guard rails in Blender? One way that I have attempted is creating an outline of the profile of the armco barrier and adding that as the bevel for a path. The upside of this is that I can control the amount of polygons for the barrier, i.e. more polygons in curved sections and less for the straigther sections. However, the downside is that it UV mapping seems to be a bit difficult to get exactly as I want it.

Another way that I have experimented with is to create a piece of the barrier as a mesh and use the array and curve modifiers to make the mesh follow a path. It's a more controlled way to do it but the downside is that the length of the piece of guard rail is constant, so you can't vary the amount of polygons according to the amount of curvature in any given point of the barrier, unless making separate pieces.

So how do you guys do it? I have tried to find and answer here but haven't managed to do so, but I apologize if this has already been addressed.

One more question is how do you add displacement to a guard rail (or a fence or a wall) to make it a bit irregular to make it look realistic?

 

[Mitch9]

Mapping the bevel shouldn´t be too hard afterwards if you use the follow active quads options, however the array is the way to go, imo.
You can vary the lenght of each piece by applying the array modifier and cutting a loop across the sections you want to bend more; they´ll follow the curve as long as you dont apply the curve modifier.
To get the irregularities, make a vertex group with the vertices you want to displace (I´ve only used the "bellies" of the "W" before) then add a displacement modifier or two set to the group you made and use a cloud texture for the displacement.

 

[JBreak]

Thanks, that's very helpful. I'll try cutting loops then