> 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

Seems you don't have exactly the same result due scaling of the 2 rails :)
I have taken the middle center and internal curves for the 2 rails
and middle center for one rail
and inverse stars for have same order
Remark : curves generator resulting from this Pipes script are different than true offset curves (no showed here)

> Remark : curves generator resulting from this Pipes script are
> different than true offset curves (no showed here)

Hi Pilou - in this case it looks like that is because of the varying radius - I mean different radius at start and end.

A normal offset curve has a constant distance at all spots, that would be more like the same radius at start and end...

- Michael

Of course :)

Michael,

Could it be possible to have few informations concerning the pipe created with an information box or inside the creation window ?? : Surface and lenght (of the original rail). Maybe the "informations box" is in project for version 2 ?

Thanks. Pierre.

Hi Pierre, there isn't any way for a script to determine the length of a curve right now, sorry.

> Maybe the "informations box" is in project for version 2 ?

Yup, I'm not sure if this one will be in the properties box or as a command in a separate "Analyze" toolbox, but I definitely want to add some analysis commands such as determine length of a curve, volume of a solid, etc... for v2.

- Michael