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Subject: 
Re: Wires anyone?
Newsgroups: 
lugnet.cad
Date: 
Wed, 6 Dec 2000 21:36:29 GMT
Viewed: 
1110 times
  
"John VanZwieten" <john_vanzwieten@email.msn.com> writes:

I changed the 50 to 43, and I was able to bend the wires more
drastically.

Are you sure about that?  As I say in the documentation for the Bezier
curve generator (follow the link which is called "Advanced useage"), the
placement of the control points are not actually used, only the vector
from the start to the control point.  To get a resulting curve with the
correct length, I have to numerically intergrate along the curve and
recursively "drag" the control points along the said vector.  This is
why composing a curve takes so much time.  The parameters for this
process can be altered.  So the distance to the control point is really
redundant information.

When you have composed a curve, you will see a comment line before the
curve elements which has four coordinates.  These indicate the _actual_
end and control points used.  I figured it was interesting to present
this information as the user could be interesting in replicating the
curve in, say, POV-Ray.

On the other hand, though, the ratio of the distance between the first
end point and the first control point and the distance between the
second end point and the second control point is preserved.  This can be
used if you want a larger curvature at one end, for example.  Can it
have been this effect you noticed?

What I really meant to say was that you could change the angle of the
control point by altering not only the "50" above, but also the other
coordinates.  But this will be a very tedious and difficult process, I'm
sure.


I also created a part for the 2x2 brick w/o the wire.  Then I place
"dummy" bricks w/ wires so that the end of the wire is where I want
my real wire to begin.  This has worked well.

Yes, this solution should be useful, albeit a bit awkward?


Perhaps you could have an "advanced" wire creator which asks how far
from the end of each wire nub the control points should be placed.  I
believe for my example above, the answer would be 3.  It would just
be easier to change this variable w/o having to edit and recompile
the source code :)

I see what you mean, but as I said above, the distance to the control
point really shouldn't matter.  If you are sure that setting both the
control point distances does produce a different result, there is a bug
in my program!  ;-)


Another suggestion: Emacs support for .mpd files.  I found out when I
loaded a file with .mpd extension, LDraw-mode didn't recognize it as
a dat file.

Ah, yes!  Thanks for the suggestion.  This should be a simple fix.  If
you want to alter the source yourself, locate this part of the source:

;; Recognize ".dat" files as LDraw DAT files.
(if (assoc "\\.dat\\'" auto-mode-alist) nil
  (setq auto-mode-alist
(append
'(("\\.dat\\'"    . ldraw-mode))
'(("\\.DAT\\'"    . ldraw-mode))
auto-mode-alist)))

It should be not too far down in the source file.

Copy this section and alter the text "dat" to "mpd".


I have also thought about making MPD composer and splitter functions in
LDraw-mode.  I figure such things may be useful.  At least to myself, as
I normally do this by hand.

Thanks for your comments!

Fredrik

PS: Sorry if this article is posted twice.  Looks like LUGNET had some
downtime lately, which was somewhat confusing.



Message is in Reply To:
  Re: Wires anyone?
 
"Fredrik Glöckner" <fredrik.glockner@bio.uio.no> wrote in message news:m3wvdpp04a.fsf@...ldomain... (...) I changed the 50 to 43, and I was able to bend the wires more drastically. I also created a part for the 2x2 brick w/o the wire. Then I place (...) (24 years ago, 6-Dec-00, to lugnet.cad)

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