>> In seriousness for a moment... Do you have ANY FRICKIN IDEA how long 
>> this took to do?!
>>
> Lets see, a pipe is a hollow cone plus a cylinder (2 minutes) add some 
> csg for the red part (another five minutes). Debugging the loop and 
> passing of parameters (+5) adding a wooden box (1 +6 for selecting the 
> right texture), getting the viewpoint right (3 minutes).
> 
> adding up... something under 15 minutes I would guess. Am I close?

Have you *tried* doing CSG with SketchUp? You don't just say "please 
intersect these two things".

First it takes about 10 minutes to try to persuade it to position the 
items where you actually ****ing want them. Then you say "intersect", 
and all it does is alter the polygon mesh slightly. YOU must then, 
manually, delete the faces you don't want any more. One at a time. You 
see, any curved surface becomes 25,000 polygons, which you must delete 
individually, one at a time.

Just to make things better, I got my CSG slightly wrong anyway, and it 
took longer to fix it.

So, now you have one pipe. But I want 23 pipes. So, first select the 
pipe and ask SketchUp to make 12 copies of it. (Fortunately, there *is* 
an automatic way to do this!) Now select 11 of those copies, and make 
them all 5% smaller. Select 10 copies, make them all 5% smaller. Select 
9 copies. Make them all 5% smaller. (Are you bored yet?) Eventually, you 
have 12 pipes, all different sizes. Now the fun part. Copy them, 
reposition the copy. Mirror it. (Do NOT rotate it as I mistakenly did!) 
Spent 20 minutes trying to make it line up properly with the existing pipes.

And, yes, stick them in a box, which takes about 45 seconds.

I can't help but feel that POV-Ray could have done this radically 
faster. And the pipes would be *real* cylinders, not 24-gon prisms. And 
they would be *shiny*!

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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