Looking For: Tapering Torii Alignment Tool

heyas;

i have a very cool free tool, 'pipe maker,' which places cylinders and cut torii end-to-end to create seamless pipes with bends and elbows and such. but it doesn't have any settings for tapering.

what i would like is a tool wherein i can tell it how much taper (oh, and lets say shear and skew and rotations and offsets too?), how much cut, and then have it attach a scaled torus seamlessly to the end of the first torus, and so on and so forth. and adding cylinders (tapered or not) in the mix would be a nice bonus.

come to think of it, a tool that can align torii side-by-side would be nice, too. or one along the inside curve of another, if they have different taper settings. that sort of thing.

does anybody know of any such or similar tools? (yes, i will pay.) thanks!

I'm pretty sure no such thing exists. I've done a bunch of things along those lines, but always worked out the math myself by hand. My feeling is that unless you've got a really good reason to want to do things in that much generality, it probably makes more sense to work things out case by case.

If you can convince Lex to update her pipemaker to do all that extra stuff I won't be complaining, but good luck with that

ah, math. that's why i want a script. i suck at math :/


do a lot of things like that? yes. i'm an animalier, i want to make swan necks, and dragon necks and tails, and snakes, lizards, cranes, ostriches, oh, and seashells and spirals and horns and.... you get the idea.

lining things up by hand is just... not fun, no. neither is trying to figure out the parameters for a torus to match a cut and sheared and tapered torus end.

so um... want to share any of your math functions, though? i mean, i have a vague idea if i do a 100% taper and a 50% cut, that gives me a taper of about 50%, so if i duplicate this torus and shrink it 50%, it ought to be the right size. maybe. but i still have to align it by hand. and only use big, round numbers.

Well it depends very much on what it is that you're trying to do. There are some general things its possible to work out, but there's always math involved, and its usually pretty specific to exactly what one is doing.

just a thought...

There are little scripts that cause a prim to report its parameters out loud, either all the time or on request. Sometimes, that is all you need to see what the parameters need to be to get them better aligned.

After awhile, you find your self making the same mental or paper and pencil adjustments. You add those to the script. Eventually, you end up with the tool you are looking for 1/2