Flow on Revolved Surface

 From:  Mike K4ICY (MAJIKMIKE)
4549.12 In reply to 4549.10 
Yes MJS, Rotational array can produce beautiful results.

In this case I wanted to establish a method to use Flow to "wrap" a pattern of objects along a rotated of non-conventional surface.

Here's a good example: ... And I finally achieved a design effect on my wish list. :-)

This woven metal basket was made by flowing each strand to the bowl shape by referencing them off of a flat rotate shape with the same control point spacing:



The grid pattern maintains it's relative shape as it is translated across U and V.

The wire object used in each run was made from one single sweep of a circle.
A wavy curve was made for the sweep rail, repeated multiple times, joined and Rebuilt to form a "seamless" object - so that Flow would work quicker. As two surfaces of half length take twice as long as one of a single length.
The wire mesh here is ad-hoc and nothing really lines up like a mesh should, but the process worked well to show.


Michael, I noticed that after selecting more than a dozen or so surfaces to Flow, the flow time was not incremental but seemed exponential.
...Or even as if it was stuck.

May I suggest placing a simple curves counter on the script to tell you how far along it is? Such as: "Object: 23 of 400"
It could also be divided into the time spent to estimate a "remaining" time.

Also, you did talk about the intricacies of using multiple processor cores - for future thought, could the total objects to flow be simply divided up and batched into separately spawned running instances of the Flow command script?
But I'm not a programming expert, just a humble fan of MoI. ;-)