Suggestion:  use a sphere sweep (in the Superpatch) or a bunch of cylinders
following the path, like the rope macro does.

Paul Brown <pau### [at] pabcomfreeservecouk> wrote in message
news:37e2d4b6@news.povray.org...
> I am looking for a utility that will allow me to generate things like
pipes,
> cup/mug handles etc.
> An example of the sort of thing I am looking for is Piper by Mike Weber
> (http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Pines/8625/piper/piper.html)
>
> This is an excellent utility which allows you to draw a path with Bsplines
> using a simple 3d editor and then allows you to "Pipe" the path. The
> resulting pipe is a raw triangle mesh. The pipe can be bent around quite
> sharp corners without the pipe cross section being "crushed" (the pipe
> radius remains fairly constant).
>
> All this is fine but I need SMOOTH pipes without the underlying triangle
> mesh showing though. Even converting the data from "raw" "raw smoothed"
did
> not help much.
>
> All this would seem to point to using Bezier patch type objects (say  a
> cylinder type patch in Moray or Spatch) and then bending and stretching
this
> into shape using rotations & translations etc.
>
> The problem with this is it's tricky to keep the "pipe" diameter constant
> after all that bending & stretching.
> It ends up looking more like ribbon then pipe!
>
> Any Ideas? Do I just have to "tough it out" with patch editors or has
> someone written something like Piper but for patch type cylinders?
>
> As a newbie this is my first post, so be kind.
> (Or I might regret "piping up" :-)  )
>
> Regards,
> Paul Brown (New POVer)
>
>
>
>

Post a reply to this message