Tapered Cylinder Prims

Just wondering if I am right to think this.

Say you want to build a tapered tower made out of a hollowed out cylinder, but 10 meters just isn't tall enough. So you have a X:10 By Y:10 By Z:10 Cylinder and you want to taper it at .1 at the top which I am assuming is 10% taper which ends up in a reducition on the X and Y by 10% (at the top). The problem I am having is ligning up the second tapered cylinder to be exactly the diameter of the top of the first cylinder, and even yet more problem came in trying to place a disc on the top of the second cylinder for the floor. What I think worked was this equation for finding the top diameter of tapered objects.

Bottom Diameter - (Bottom Diameter * Taper %) = Top Diameter

So for the example above it seemed to work out as:

10 - (10 * .1) = 9

So 9 is what the diameter at the top of the bottom cylinder is and then would also have to be what the bottom diameter of the top cylinder would need to be.

So to find the Diameter of the floor at the very top of the top cylinder which is using the same taper as the one below it I would use the same equation:

9 - (9 * .1) = 8.1 for the floor diameter.

This seemed to work perfectly but I was wondering if I am leaving something out.

Your reasoning seems sound.

Furthermore, if all the pieces have the same X and Y posiytion coordinates, and if the Z-height coordinate for each section is that of the base piece plus 10 M per section, they should all line up perfectly.

double check two things while working with prims. These are small bugs that I still see pop up unexpectedly from time to time.

First, there is still a small number drift that pops up on occasion. You might set a certain value for a certain variable and then you'll see other numbers, slightly rounded off, appear in the place of your numbers. Alot of times, it'll cycle through a few numbers and then settle on the number you chose but other times it'll settle on an off number.

For example, you'll set a taper of .1 and then move on. But if you stare at that value, you'll see it move.

Second, if you're trying to rotate a prim (for example, making of copy of your first cone and rotating it 180 deg.) You'll think you snapped it correctly, the rotation box will tell you it's rotated properly, but zooming in will reveal that it's not actually rotated right. entering in the numbers 180 manually usually fixes this problem.

I guess my theme here is double check your numbers against what the prim looks like. It's not always your fault if things don't line up.

~Lefty

I've used this calculation before in buildings and it's always worked for me. (If it didn't, I'd be worried quite honestly as that's what it *should* do.)