Thursday, June 19, 2008

PartPad is back from the dead - almost

When I set about restructuring the 3D feature code I quickly killed the Pad and Shaft features.  They both died in the aftermath of auto-LOD and topological-correctness.  Between the checkins I made yesterday and those from today, I am happy to say that Pad is back!

Here is a quick review of the primary changes:
  1.  Instead of having one surface for the top of the pad regardless of the number of separate bodies there should be one top and one bottom per body.  This is almost done.  I am up to the last step of where the actual surfaces are generated.  All of the data necessary is now in place.  Should be done tomorrow.
  2. Topology model generation wasn't even a thought in the old version.  Now as the extrusion points, curves, and surfaces are being generated they are recorded in way to greatly ease the topology model creation.  Again, I am just up to the point of creating the topology model.  I am going to spend tonight figuring out the algorithm details and tomorrow hope to implement and do some testing.
  3. Points!  An eagle-eyed user would have noticed that no points were ever generated with a Pad.  I only had curves and surfaces.  Now points are there and are correct.  Yahoo.
  4. Initial code is in place to eventually support pads that go "UpTo".  Here is the list of types I want to be able to support: Dimension, UpToNext, UpToLast, UpToPlane, UpToSurface.  Right now only Dimension works, but we shouldn't have to change the object interface much in the future.
Lastly, the code is much more efficient and logical now.  When I first wrote it I just wanted to make sure that it worked.  Now it not only works but works well.  I hope to finish up all of the little details tomorrow.  Next week I want to get shaft back working.

Once these two are back I can move on to boolean operations with the solids.  That will be the crazy cool stuff.

Cheers,
   Graham

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You're doing wonderful work, but I think some documentation is sorely needed. The interface has a great feel and I've figured out how to draw basic shapes in the sketcher, but that is it...