"Winston" wrote in message
...
Larry Jaques patiently intoned:
On Wed, 01 Oct 2008 20:00:12 -0700, the infamous Winston
scrawled the following:
(...)
Do you have a license for Advanced Lexicogrification or is it
just a hobby?
I have a poetic license which I waft around on occasion. Otherwise,
it's purely hobbitical. /waft
Hey for twelve bucks a year, that ain't bad!
Or was that a fishing license? I forget.
(...)
"Oh, is _that_ what I'd made?" cooed Winnie.
A lift by any other name, still smells like hydraulic oil.
--Winnie '08
(...)
E=MC(squared). It's the law. (Ask Uncle Al) Oh, sorry. You're
talking about acronymical software. My bad.
I heard recently that Al meant that literally.
All this time I thought he was just euphemizing.
Imagine my shock. I mean, _Damn_!
(...)
That's not too bad, but still... So, what upgrades/fixes did you get
for that fee?
I went from Rhino 2 to 4, so here are the big additions:
http://www.rhino3d.com/3/whatisnew.htm
http://www.rhino3d.com/4/newfeatures.htm
The ones I use most are the autocomplete command line, improved Boolean
operations, easily editable text blocks, enhanced display support.
Most everything else is 'gravy'.
I've noodled around with scripting but haven't done anything serious with
it.
See, I played with Red Hat Linux for a few years, too.
I got *real tired* of sending them $170 every few months for support.
Grok that, in spades. Is that where you got the "the first taste is
free" leader?
Yup. "The large print giveth, and the small print taketh away."
Tom Waits _Small Change_ 1976
You might be interested in a job I did with Rhino when I was at Wasino. We
were pitching Ford Motor on our lathes with the elliptical-machining gadget
for turning pistons in production. Car pistons today have complex shapes.
The Ford piston we were working on was a near-ellipse at the top, which
blended into a true ellipse near the middle, and then into another
near-ellipse at the skirt.
Ford gave us the formulas for the three shapes and I loaded them into Excel
so it would produce finite values at 36 points around the piston for each
formula. Then I loaded those values into Rhino as a script (Rhino will read
directly from Excel). Rhino blended the points with NURBS curves into a
smooth shape around the piston. And, the more interesting part to me, it
took the values of each of the three formulas at every 10-degree increment
and blended *them* from top to bottom of the piston. The end result was an
all-NURBS 3D shape.
The purpose of this was not to machine the pistons from those values, or
from the Rhino file (Ford gave us CAM files to machine the pistons), but
rather to make illustrations so we could show what we were doing.
Of course, the non-cylindrical values were a couple of thousandths here and
there, so you couldn't see it, either in the Rhino file or in a machined
piston. The reason I loaded it into Excel first was so that I could apply
multipliers to the values and play with them until I got something
exaggerated enough to see easily in the rendered Rhino file. It was
tricky -- too much and it distorted the shape beyond all recognition. But by
being able to just plug in new multipliers and then to see the rendered file
in less than a minute, I was able to adjust it by trial and error in around
15 minutes.
Ford was impressed by this and I think they adopted it for their own
purposes. Rhino handled it for us slick as could be.
--
Ed Huntress