Experimental 3D plug track - up to version 244c

[Martin Wynne]

@Michael Woods

Hi Michael,

Chair heaving is part of the shove timbers function. That's at real > shove timbers or just press the comma key.

Click on the timber number, and then click the heave chairs button:

A new dialog appears on which you can heave (i.e. change) or omit any of the chairs on that timber.

If you click the customize... button you can change the jaw options for the one specific chair.

If you change it to an SC chair (bottom of the list) you can also click the SC size... button to change its outline dimensions.

n.b. you are changing the control template. It will need to be stored before you can do the 3D exports.

The dialog is rather large but it can be dragged around out of the way using the top bar. I will try to shrink it down a bit when I have finished adding things to it.

edit: posts crossed.

cheers,

Martin.

 

[Martin Wynne]

Having written that it is of course the obvious solution. I think I can see a way of doing it, but it will take quite a lot of work.

@Steve_Cornford

Thanks for the suggestions Steve. I didn't want to reduce the width of the flanges because it would mean losing the dropper wire retaining ridges. I'm quite pleased with those, they work well.

But coding is a funny business. Something which you think should take only an hour or two turns out to take 3 weeks of head scratching.

Then something which you think will take several days turns out to need only an evening.

This is now working, and will save a lot of time. Yet another tickbox:

Box unticked -- many sockets obstructed with conflicting timber flanges and webs:

Box ticked -- all sockets clear:

Admittedly the algorithm is a bit primitive, but I think it will work 99% of the time in this application where everything is rectangular.

But it does remove the entire web or flange, rather than just the offending part of it. Which means that some timbers may end up attached to the webs at one end only -- it would be worth running a splint or two under the timbers between the sockets to restore the integrity of the brick.

Note that although the offending flanges and webs will be removed from the 3D output, they will still show on the trackpad screen.

This will be in 244c shortly.

cheers,

Martin.