Full Version: Pipe_3 plugin W.I.P.

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@Burr - and the reason why that is happening to the pipe straight segments is that those surfaces are trimmed cylinders, not ruled surfaces (like a loft between 2 curves).

You can see this if you turn on the segment surface's control points.

- Michael

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Hi Michael,
Thank you for the great explanation and visuals! Huge help...

I will go over this with Kraus now to see if we can tune up his command, because I think it is usefull.

My results are created in his command when I create a polyline and then use the "square" and his "segmentation" option

I was confused because the result is a "square sweep" with mitered corners, with the segmentation adding the segments to the miters.

Which "should" produce even blends. Its just a square making sharp turns for each segment.

But

When I turned on control points, each segment showed points with large extensions in both directs (Much larger than the actual segment.) So we may need to ask his segmentation to be an "equal divide" so the underlying surfaces are even. Its as if his segments have varying underlying surface lengths. Random even.

I had seen this underlying geometry before, but didnt know enough about it. Like In ViaCad I see alot of "Huge torus points" attached to imported fillets or large underlying construction point objects like hidden cyclinders. I always thought of it as how ACIS did geometry. Actually a great lesson in how to model!!

Let me experiment a bit with what MoI's Regular mitered corners output vs what Krauses command creates to see if they are the same result, or if AI is going about things in a different and unreliable way... (That is the goal to help Kraus get a good, useful tool)

Anyway, enough talk. Let me dig in a bit later today, now that you explained to me what I am seeing. I'll reach out if I need any help.

Thanks again....

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Hi Burr, it's not particularly an "error" to have large underlying surfaces, it's a valid way to have geometry constructed.

If you like you can run the ShrinkTrimmedSrf command to reduce them.

I was a little surprised that the segment pieces were trimmed extended cylinders instead of ruled surfaces (like loft between 2 curves) but either way is valid.

But the ruled surface way would probably be a lot simpler to code because you can make something like this in just one use of the Loft command with Loft style = Straight:





That Blend behaves differently on the edge of a box versus the edge of a pipe3 elbow segment (because they are not isoparm edges) is more of a limitation in Blend where it is trying to automatically adjust behavior so that it doesn't pop up a huge set of options.

But it would be useful to be able to control that behavior in Blend so I would like to improve that in the future.

- Michael

Image Attachments:
burr_blend_dir10.png  burr_blend_dir11.png 

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Thanks Michael.

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Hi Michael,
The trims most certainly are at an angle to the underlying surface. My original testing I was making "Perpendicular trims" and just rotating my ends to be at the angle.

Once I understood from your explanation, I see what and why,

Thanks again.

If you DO make blend smarter in various situations, then we all win!

Image Attachments:
segment trim.jpg 

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Ok that was fun :)

Image Attachments:
Pencil.png 

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Very cool result! :)

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Show messages: All  1-13  14-20