On Fri, 16 Apr 1999 02:37:56 +0200, Ralf Muschall
<rmu### [at] t-onlinede> wrote:

>Here is a trick I tried: Take a torus, cut it into sectors,
>and shear each sector (using "Matrix", doing y += c*x)
>a little, and shift adjacent sectors up so that they match.
>
>The math is easy (the formulas fit on a single page).
>The problem with this method is that shearing distorts the
>cross section of the torus into ellipses, and adjacent 
>ellipses don't match exactly, which becomes visible unless
>the sectors are very short and the material is rough.

You do realize you're replying to a post from almost a year ago,
right? 

Anyway, one nice quick-and-dirty way to do spring-like things is to
use my spring.inc file, from http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/traces.html
There are of course other springs out there, but I'm irrationally
attached to mine.  It cuts the toruses into quarters, then rotates
them in such a way as to make a continuous (well, C1 anyway) helix.

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