Make pipes easier for tubulars/pipes frames professionnals designers

 From:  Michael Gibson
1463.5 In reply to 1463.1 
Hi Pierre, have you seen the "auto place" mode for sweeping?

This is shown in a couple of the video tutorials here: http://moi3d.com/1.0/docs/tutorials.htm

If you want to create a number of pipes all with the same radius, it is only necessary to create one single circle as a profile, just place the circle off to the side away from the pipes. It is not necessary to draw a circle into position for each pipe that you want to create, once you have drawn the one circle, you can select it and use it for creating each pipe that you need.

So for a simple pipe with no inner radius, there really isn't much speed to be gained by a specialized command.

The benefit of this system is that it is only one minor step extra than a specialized pipe command (draw the circle), but it is much more generally useful because you can draw whatever shape of profile you want, polygons, squares, etc..., you aren't strictly limited to only a circular profile like you would be with a specialized pipe command.

That's the reason why there is no dedicated pipe tool in MoI, instead I did some extra work to make the sweep tool easier to use for this purpose.


But after having said all of that, I think it should be possible to create a custom command for you that works like a kind of macro and automates these steps just given a radius.

I'll see if I can cook that up for you a little bit later today, I don't think it should be too difficult.


Right now sharp corners aren't handled in the way that you need though, this is a limitation of the current sweep command that it does not do the extra extensions and trimming work to produce mitered corners. I am planning on working on this for v2 though.

- Michael