Polyline pipe with shortened pipe sections

I'm struggling to make a piped polyline where the individual pipe sections of the polyline can be shortened to create a gap between the pipe sections. The miter angles of the sections and the pipe diameter are to be preserved.

Anyone have any suggestions? DeBrep the pipe into its components did not work work out.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Anton Bakker on November 11, 2015 at 5:36pm

Joseph, thanks so much for helping out, much appreciated. I'm going to play with that definition. I also advanced some by piping, debrep, capping the pipe sections and debrep the pipe sections to create planes through the caps. I'm doing all this to create steel pipe sections that have chamfer edges and that are space a little to create some tolerance for welding.

Permalink Reply by Anton Bakker on November 11, 2015 at 6:06pm

Wow, this does the trick! Thank you much!

Permalink Reply by Joseph Oster on November 11, 2015 at 6:20pm

Permalink Reply by Anton Bakker on November 11, 2015 at 6:26pm

Nice! Your definitions works great. I'm modifying it for 3 dimensions of pipes and 3 boxes with different thickness. Then I plan to filter the edges and loft that into one pipe. Thanks again for the help / work.

Permalink Reply by Joseph Oster on November 12, 2015 at 9:55am

Method #5 - Best yet!

This is a variation of effort #3, moving the ring edges of each segment toward the center of each segment. But instead of lofting them, they are used to trim ('SrfSplit') the pipe segments. The results are sorted by area to get the largest piece of each split segment.

This avoids the boxes at each joint and the potential for unwanted intersections between them. And it doesn't depend on 'Solid Difference (SDiff)' either.

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