Hi Will,

> Hi Michael, well to answer your first question the diameter
> would have to be small enough to fit though the section
> where the curves are the closest -

Well, it is really tough to try and come up with a definition that works in all cases.

Like with this curve here:



If the diameter is the part where pieces of the curve are closest together, does that mean that the diameter is located in the little bottom part of this curve?


> I get your point but I certainly wouldn't be making piping and
> ducting with a shape like that...

Well, the tough thing is that once you start taking in generic curve input, I have to try to consider what to do when given curves like that.

I think that generally to make it work would require focusing on a thickness type value instead of a radius/diameter type value. It's kind of a different set of UI than what Pipe does right now with radius values.

- Michael

Will
If this is accepted, this pdf may help in working out methods in MoI to create Greebles/Nurnies.
Brian

Techniques and tutorials are always appreciated, thanks Brian!

This will definitely come in handy. I just want to focus on fusionThing for a bit cause I've had it for a while and I need to finally get my head around it and become comfortable with using it...

-Will

Hi Pilou,

> Maybe a factor of reduction from start to end?

How about the ability to specify a different radius at the end, that would probably fit more easily with this UI.

I'll see if I can cook up a different version that does that a bit later.

- Michael

Hi Petr,

> -both curves are planar
> -both curves are lying on the same plane
> -one of them is completely inside the other
>
> What do you feel about it, Michael?

Definitely a good idea! Maybe something that is used only for auto-place mode?

It probably is not too difficult to achieve, I already have a mechanism for determining contained planar regions used for Extrude and Planar.


> edit: And generally, if there was more than two rails selected, MoI
> would sweep a profile(s) along each rail individually. It would allow
> "handling a larger number of curves at once" :)

Yup, I was thinking about this one a bit too. It's slightly odd in that there is an exception for 2 curves being the 2-rail sweep instead... But it seems practical enough, I mean if you only have 2 one-rail sweeps to build, that is not such a big problem to repeat manually.

Added to the wishlist.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>>Maybe something that is used only for auto-place mode?

I think so. Anyway, is there any snag in it to use it for sweeping without auto-place mode?


Will it work in case of multiple pair-of-profiles? (top part of the image below)



And will the resulting objects be editable using history mechanism or it will break a history on the object like custom command Pipe does?

Petr

Hi Petr,

> Anyway, is there any snag in it to use it for sweeping without auto-place mode?

Just possibly some extra work to set up non-auto-place mode since they go through somewhat separate code paths. But maybe with a bit of re-arranging it would not be a problem to enable it for both types.


> Will it work in case of multiple pair-of-profiles? (top part of the image below)

Yup, I don't see any problem with that. If you use a pair of profiles in one spot, then you'll have to use pairs throughout though.

Also if you use multiple proflies I think you'll only be able to have one hole inside of them. With a single profile multiple holes would work (like imagine a circle with 3 small circles inside of it as holes), but with multiple profiles it will be hard to figure out how to match things up.


> And will the resulting objects be editable using history mechanism or
> it will break a history on the object like custom command Pipe does?

It should work fine with history.

- Michael

Hi Pilou,

> Maybe a factor of reduction from start to end?

Hi Pilou, give the attached new version a try. The command for this one is Pipe2, you can rename the files if you want it to replace the previous Pipe command instead.

This one allows you to specify different outer and inner radius values which get applied to the end of the sweep.

So for example:



This version doesn't automatically update the pipes when you enter values in, you need to push the Update button to see your changes take effect for this version. This is so you can more easily input multiple values, because Pipe does not have the same kind of interruptability that regular commands have.

- Michael

This is the famous "This is not a pipe" by Magritte :)
Bravo!


PS What append when the angle of the curve is too compound / radius?

> PS What append when the angle of the curve is too compound / radius?

It formats your hard drive.... So be careful not to do that! ;)

- Michael

> PS What append when the angle of the curve is too compound / radius?

But seriously this time - it should actually create a surface in these cases, but the surface will be messy and have kind of self-intersecting folds in it.

A surface like that won't be suitable for many other operations on it that involve calculating intersections on the surface, such as booleans or filleting.

It usually can be exported, but of course the result will also be kind of messy but possibly some times that may be ok depending on what you are doing.

So generally those types of things should be avoided, except in a special case where you are only going to export the surface without further operations on it, and you don't mind the messy polygon arrangement either.

- Michael

So in this case the script can't alert? And say "Auto-intersection will be arrive: are you sure to make it" Y / N

> So in this case the script can't alert? And say "Auto-intersection
> will be arrive: are you sure to make it" Y / N

Unfortunately it takes quite a lot of slow calculations to determine if there will be a self-intersection or not.

So it is difficult to make something like that work nicely.

In a certain sense it would kind of penalize the simple and clean situations since those would take longer to process but then for no gain in those cases...

- Michael

It's yet not so bad :)

Don't Smoke :)

Another advantage of the pipe constructor :)
You make your first curve and pipes tapered as usual
At then end you re take the curves resulting for now a Sweep :)
Profil must be out of the "box" of the curves for an automatic sweeping!

Frenchy Pilou - Nice example with the "star". I think you have made a solution for a complex shape I have been trying to figure out.

Ed

Nice example Pilou!

Another method to do that is instead of using one star and 2 rails, you can use one rail and 2 stars, like this:



Select those 2 stars (and make sure they are placed away from the bounding box around the rail path), and the run Construct / Sweep, and pick the rail curve to get this:



With this method you don't have to create a pipe first...

But sometimes it can be nice to extract edges for further constructions in different cases, that is a good idea to keep in mind.

- Michael

There hasn't been this much talk about pipes since the Plumbers Convention in Las Vegas.

I forgot about sweeping using two sizes of profiles. I assume using two different shaped profiles is OK?

Ed

Hi Ed,

> I assume using two different shaped profiles is OK?

Yup, it should work fine, just like the example you show there.

If there are a different number of segments between the shapes, it will still work but you will get a lot of kind of funky surface stripes in the in-between part where one shape kind of morphs into the other...

If you have the same number of segments between each profile you will get a cleaner type of 1-to-1 matching between the segments.

- Michael