"Chris R" <car### [at] comcastnet> wrote:
> In a continued spate of library development, I took a bunch of disparate code I
> had written for chains used in other scenes and consolidated it into a library I
> call libchain.inc.
.....
> -- Chris R

This is pretty nice.
I do recall the the rope system, as well as numerous attempts to write robust
catenary macros.

For whatever reason, I recently began digging back into the catenary curve, and
it's truly surprising how little I am able to look up in terms of solving for
regularly spaced points along the arc-length of the curve (which is obviously
needed to create chain links, etc.

I have a whole pile of code that makes bad catenary curves, and a few good
snippets that make a proper catenary that passes through 2 <x, y> points.
I have code that evaluates the integral for arc-length L.
But nothing that I'd dare claim was comprehensive or robust.

I'm not sure how much you copy-pasted, and how much you re-derived, but it would
be nice to have a didactic diagramming of the catenary that shows the roles of
a, b, c, x, and how the arc-length gets evenly subdivided.

I can fill in the idle hours with making the actual scene, etc.  I just need
quality equations and a good understanding of why they work (and ideally why
mine _don't_)

Looking forward to seeing more renders of new features.  :)

- BW

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