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23rd June 2006, 07:33 AM | #1 |
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spiral spring: am I drawning in a glass of water?
Drawing a spiral coil: before I tryed I was bluntly sure that a few mouse clicks would do it. Now I'm not as sure anymore.
Mind you, not a helicoid, a true spiral: the radius gradually increasing or decreasing, but all on the same plane - the kind of spring you still find in old-fashioned mechanical clocks or toys. |
23rd June 2006, 10:25 AM | #2 |
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Re: spiral spring: am I drawning in a glass of water?
I thought there *may* have been a way to do this using Replicator --- I can't see a way to offset the extrusions where they make a spiral, however...
I needed this functionality a while back, and as it wasn't in AC3D already, I ended up getting "Spiralizer": http://www.armanisoft.ch/webdesign/FrmDownloads.html Scroll to the bottom section and click that Spiralizer link if you don't understand German. It exports to DXF, which loads nicely into AC3D. Good workaround until there's a way to do this natively in AC3D... |
23rd June 2006, 11:36 AM | #3 |
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Re: spiral spring: am I drawning in a glass of water?
You could still do it manually by moving the vertices in a helicoid inward while still keeping close to the same plane they were on and keeping an eye on the distance moved display.
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25th June 2006, 08:42 AM | #4 |
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Re: spiral spring: am I drawning in a glass of water?
Thanks folks, mostly for confirming that the Alzheimer hasn't had me yet And, Dennis, thanks for Spiralizer - guess I'll have it downloaded and tested before the Sunday's over.
Anyway I muddled through by applying the old-fashioned trick (from the times of ruler and ink) of drawing a set of concentric circles with decreasing radii, deleting three quarters of each, rotating and assembling together the remaining arcs, drawing (manually!) a path along the vertices and then eventually extruding the cross-section along the latter. Pretty dirty indeed, and it took a helluva time - but the final result really looked like a spiral. |
25th June 2006, 10:16 AM | #5 |
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Re: spiral spring: am I drawning in a glass of water?
One other method worth considering:
To mimic the 2d shape of a spiral in AC3D, I followed the steps from the attached image: 1. I pulled the image of a spiral off the web ( http://images.google.com/images?q=spiral ) 2. Loaded the image in the AC3D Front view using Ortho -> Set Background Image, then traced the spiral image using a Line. 3. Subdivided the Line. The Spiralizer will be better if you're going for more mathematic precision, or for spiraling the spring "upward", but this is probably a faster/easier way to get a basic spiral... |
25th June 2006, 12:22 PM | #6 |
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Re: spiral spring: am I drawning in a glass of water?
Dennis,
Could this be a need for a more "generalization" of your wave plugin? |
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