On Mar 28, 2012, at 09:30 AM, Bob Anderson <bob.ander...@survice.com> wrote:
I am a user of BRL-CAD, not a programmer, who recently posted a project idea via Sean Morrison to convert a facetted line geometry into a line that uses BRL-CAD's native pipe solid. We have developed a Tcl script as a plugin to Archer (which will eventually be BRL-CAD's new GUI) that finds the end point of the facetted line and then steps through it at a user specified interval. Currently, the code has no method for using the pipe's bend radius attribute, therefore each bend is made of several vertices. The goal is to have a line in BRL-CAD that is editable for re-routing. If the bends have a lot of vertices the resultant pipe still cannot be re-routed with any degree of efficiency. Since this project is fairly new on the ideas page, I thought you may not have seen it. I also believe that your math skills would be more applicable than programming.
Bob makes an excellent point. As several students have expressed an interest in a math-related topic, that one is apt.
It's also very closely related to the logic one would need to implement for determining the medial axis of a polygonal mesh. With a set of spline curves along the medial axis, replacing the mesh with an implicit "pipe" primitive becomes fairly easy and robust. There are other methods one could employ like just trying to determine a centerline and branching points manually, too.
Cheers!
Sean
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