Hi Michael and everyone else here in MOI_land!

I've been playing with the Scale Array script/macro and truly find it useful and fun. A long time ago here when it was being considered by Michael he stated the following which intrigues me...

"I'll see if I can write a macro to do the scaling after the array is finished. If this is possible then it would also be possible to adapt the script macro to do other effects beyond scaling as well." - Michael (<index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=263.32>)

It's these "other effects" which intrigue me here, specifically a notion I still have of altering this now-existing Scale Array script/macro slightly to do a little more than just scale the array.

For instance, lets say you have a long curved line with a sphere solid at the starting point as well as a point object located in the same xyz space as both the start of the line and the center of the sphere. Then you select both the sphere and the point object and use the standard MOI array curve command prior to using select-all and running the keyboard shortcut for the scale array script/macro as usual... only a new option appears in the subsequent dialog allowing you to subdivide the total number of points in the array (like choosing segments of 2 in a 10 point array), at which point the dialog continues as normal only the output is different... producing scaled-down versions of the first scalled array from the size and location of each segmented point. (ie: 3d fractals in MOI) And then there's the thought of introducing angular variations at those segments...

I would write this myself if I knew how to, but since I don't I'm hoping that someone who can may see the potential in making this happen just as I do.

Food for thought anyone?

- 3dvisuals dude

Hi Dude, for the "other effects", I was mostly thinking about other types of transforms such as rotation, non-uniform scale, or maybe some kind of displacement.

I'm not entirely sure I follow the segements idea. Can you maybe attach a small sketch or something?

It may be difficult to do inside of scale array if it involves producing new array instances. The way scale array works is it doesn't really know anything about the original array method, the only information that it has available to it is a set of objects and a center point for those objects... This is enough information to do a transformation of that array instance, but it doesn't have the information to go back to the original array generator and do more arrays.

Something like that would probably need to be more built in to the array commands themselves.

But I'm not really sure I understand though.

- Michael

Hi Michael and thanks...

Given how busy I know you must be I tried to word that request in such a way that someone other than you might try to tackle the idea! Sorry to distract you from more important stuff, but thanks for the clear response.

Unfortunately what you described in response was accurate to my original intent but clearly much more work than I had anticipated would be required to make the idea work. As you pointed out, the scale array script/macro "doesn't really know anything about the original array method," which I hadn't expected... and that pretty much kills the idea I had for an easy conversion of the existing scale array code to produce additional itterations of the original array after completion of the first. Oh well...

Too bad, I thought it would be a very cool thing to be able to produce fractal itterations of any object array within MOI. Maybe some day down the road... there aren't to many 3d programs that can achieve fractal itterations without a lot of work.

Thanks for all the work you ARE doing though, I love this program and look forward to V1 of it! ;^)

- 3dvisuals dude

A somptuous mechanical squaries fractal gallery
http://www.fractal-recursions.com/files/mech0019.html
Click for Zoom

Problem with fractals is that the file grows some speedy :)

What you're showing there looks like a type of L-systems parser but with instructions that can move along curves...

- Michael