Bezier lathe - looking for testers

I finally got a chance to test out this tool today. It's an incredibly powerful tool and pretty sweet. Thanks for letting me give it a test drive, Cadroe .

The great potential I saw was being able to round or square up moulding (other beziered objects). This tool in conjunction with BezierGen can make shapes and designs like a (carpenter's) router.

I did spot a glitch in the tool though. It happens when you rez the splined prims, make subtle adjustments to the control handles, change the alignment and then input "/77 curve" to "redraw" the spline. Some or most of the prims don't align properly and jut out, breaking up the smooth line.

Thinking it was just a minor hiccup, I went ahead and lathed it. To my surprise, it ended up rotating each individual prim 180° while it lathed. Not what I expected it to do, but it created a happy accident of abstract art.

Re-rezzing the spline before lathing fixes it. It's a considerably more time consuming alternative to the curve command when there are many segments but it gets the job done.

Brenham - That, sir, is a bug! Thanks for the detailed info. Alignment was the most recent addition, so I can't say I'm shocked to see a glitch there. I'll be working on a fix as soon as I get in-world. I'll drop you the new version. I'm glad you found the tool useful, and thanks for the feedback.

If you're still allowing people to test out your lathe tool, I would be more than interested. I just recently got to a point where I'm slightly stuck on the geometry, and I have some experience with your other tools as well. If you need any additional feedback, let me know.

What an exciting tool! If it's no too late to ask I would love to try it out.

I'm not that an experienced builder, but i use bezier curves all the time in Adobe Creative Studio. And I love those curved roofs!!! I one of those who thinks we should have DXL (or similar) import into SL.

Warm Regards

Fur Yifu

If you're still looking for testers i'd be delighted to help you with this tool it looks very interesting.

i too will like to test out your product, hope its not to late.

hmm it seems that the controls arn't align straight when you rez them.

side note: is there a way to change the hight of each prim to a smaller scale?

I would love to test your tool if you still want people to. That is just the kind of thing that every builder needs! I always *always* want round things! lol

The control handles rez at a default location, you can always move them. Also, it would sort of defeat the purpose of having a bezier tool with all 4 control handles (start/end points + start/end bends) lined up in a straight line on the X and Y axis.

You can increase/decrease the number of segments to shorten the height of each prim collectively. Also, you can add/subtract distance between the start and end point control handles to adjust the height of each prim but that would mean changing the overall height of the bezier object.

Hey Cadroe, I was thinking, would it be possible for you to add in the option for changing the 'Building Block Type' for all prims lathed?

I know it is beyond the scope of what a real lathe does but I found various different uses for this tool and adding a block type modifier would definitely ease the tediousness of having to go to each and every prim to change it. Here are some ways I've been using this thing:


I'm pretty sure there were a few more ways I used this tool other than what was intended but I don't quite remember at the moment. Oh well, it'll come back to me sooner or later.

Btw, I wish there was a 3rd taper option (z-taper?). SL prims don't allow for tapering hollow sides. A lathed bell-shaped dome of hollow circles would have been great...

I will give it a go. Take my mind off of the problem with prims showing through each other.

Thank you for your work on these tools.

My background is with high end 3D tools...My main tool is 3D Studio Max...would love to find some of the functionality of a lathe in SL...if you still need testers....please forward the tool....Thanks

oh that looks so good

i would love to test it

Thanks to you testers, I've made a couple of improvements and plan on some others.

First, I've changed the Lathe so that the preview curve is generated in the same way as the final shape. This means the preview curve is now exactly one slice of the final shape; it's the same in dimensions and alignment. I think this really helps in seeing what you're building.

A user alerted me to a memory problem with large number of segments. I've changed the program so it now uses a fixed amount of memory regardless of the number of segments.

On the other hand, in the process I discovered that SL is imposing a hard limit of 99 prims being rezzed by my tools at a time. I don't know why this is happening. I tested it in a variety of ways, with delays, and SL always silently fails to rez that 100th prim. So for now, that's just the limit, unfortunately for number of segments or number of sides, for a total of 9801 prims

Here are some improvements I'm hoping to get in soon. One is the ability to override the "width" of the blocks, which would allow you to create things like scaffolding by making the width narrow (picture a zeppelin frame). Another is the ability to set the prim type (cube, cylinder, etc). Also, the ability to lathe a section of the shape by specifying a number of slices. That would make the following redundant, but I might add it anyway: the ability to freeze the preview curve in place, in case that's all you wanted. Finally, an option for the tool to report all settings or just the main ones, and a way for the tool to chat the exact positions of the control points so you can save them easily.

Whew. Not as much work as it might seem, but a bit to do. But when I get these things in place, there should be one final round of testing and then the Lathe will be released. I do appreciate all the testing and feedback.

Brenham - Thanks for the report on your experiments with the Lathe. Hopefully some of the coming improvements will help your efforts. You and CoyoteAngel both suggested being able to change the prim type and the ability to generate something like "splines", so the input is appreciated.