> The real (interesting) problem for povray is the computation of the
> involute, as a native shape... then maybe some native gear shape, to
> handle more natively than a complex union/intersection, per tooth ?
> (nah, I would reuse my interunion object for that, probably...)
> (or may be a "duplicate teeth" object, where all intersections get
> rotated to a single teeth)
>
> mmmhhh, interesting...

I've calculated the involute curve, so I would imagine just taking the
coordinates for a full tooth, and rotating those with a transform to make all
the teeth, and then make a prism.


> helical gear... yet another beast... yummy (and more silent than the
> basic gears at a small cost of maximal power)

> The real hungry would go for hypoid gears, they are really painful.

IIRC, someone designed a new type of gear that's an even wilder curve.
Trying to look that up, I found:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/animals/a9449/the-first-gear-discovered-in-nature-15916433/

:O


> If you have physical access to the gear, the fastest is to use a tailor
> rule (the soft thing the tailor uses to measure) around the full circle,
> and measure a small number of teeth. You might be off by a few unit, but
> it's fast. (but does not work for gear with teeth on the inside,
> including epicyclic gears)

I have hundreds of them.
I looked up reverse engineering of gear geometry, and a simple way is get it wet
with ink and roll it on a paper.   I suppose if I removed one of the teeth or
part of one, that would be a marker for tooth #1....

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