10000 elements... It would still be parsing on my P133... Well, the macro was
created initially to fill a space so... It could be easily altered to work in 2D
only, though (the 6 directions are in an array called dirP, just replace the z
and -z directions by x and y). The box_hole feature is only there to prevent the
apparition of "decorations" where you can't see them and thus save memory and
parsing time.

I can see two ways to obtain the desired effect.
- First, create pipes with a relatively flat container box (like <100,100,10>,
so that it will constrain the pipes in a "wall" structure. Then you'll be able
to arrange the walls all around the Borg ship.
- Second, instead of creating a single pipe with many elements, try creating
smaller pipes and rotate them. A trick that never fails in this kind of
situation is to create a first set of elements and then replicate it with
different angles and different positive and negative scaling (I've been using
this trick to create large prairies with only one initial patch of grass). In
the demo image, I created a first "cage" with five pipes and then used it twice
: one regular copy and one negative copy (scale -1). Since it's a cube, you
could also rotate the initial cage at 90 degrees in every direction a few times
and obtain pseudo complexity at little cost. You can probably use the same pipe
5 or 6 times and nobody will notice it. Don't forget to turn on the dofile
feature so you won't have to parse everything everytime.

I hope this helps.
Gilles

Second

Equiprawn wrote:

> I did try this, but I couldn't get enough objects on the surface, all the
> pipes just turned inside. I actually have nPipe=10000, which took quite a
> while to parse. I think you might be able to control how many pipes go
> inside with the #declare box_hole variable, but I couldn't get it to work.
> Mr Tran?
>

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