I attach here my version of a coil generator.  It
doesn't compete with Chris Colfax's version

http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/Lakes/1434/otherincludes.html

(highly recommended), but is compact and is in #macro
form.  Ron Parker has another version on his web page :

http://www2.fwi.com/~parkerr/traces.html

I also attach a macro form of some of John VanSickl's matrix formulas
for vector transformations... these are from his excellent
matrix tutorial :

http://www.erols.com/vansickl/matrix.htm

VectorAlign() is used in the coil macro.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.

Dan

P.S. Note that constructing coils out of
rotated half-toroids produces distorted coils,
with zero slope at the interfaces.  So this macro
is intended for long-range views of the object.

Chris Colfax has a ball-and-stick solution.  A better
approach might be to use multiple toroidal segments
per revolution.  Ron does this in his macro, but
the implementation isn't quite right.

-- 
http://www.flash.net/~djconnel/

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'toruscoil.inc.txt' (2 KB) Download 'vectortransform.inc.txt' (2 KB)