Pipe component

Hi All,
I feel the Pipe component is kinds of low efficiency. Everytime after I add numbers of pipes depending on my strucure model line segements,it takes too much time to disply the results. I have to admit my CPU is not very powerful.But Is there any probability to make some enhancement from the inside?Like modify code??Just code-idiot thinks .Thanks.

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on January 7, 2010 at 8:10am

To my knowledge, there really aren't many options for speeding up piping. First of all, creating a pipe, though simple conceptually, is not the lightest geometric operation ever. There should be some logic to deal with self intersections of the pipe, so maybe things could be sped up if those checks were bypassed. Secondly, the meshing of the pipes is also an operation that's computationally expensive. Again, there isn't too much that can really be done here, but you can display the GH solution as wireframe, which would probably speed things up.

Permalink Reply by Jon Mirtschin on January 7, 2010 at 8:29am

Damien is quite right, displaying cylinders is graphically intensive. It depends on what you are trying to achieve, but meshing cylinders as polygon cross sections might be acceptable, particularly if it's a distance from the viewport camera. Might be more trouble with managing it than it's worth though.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on January 7, 2010 at 9:32am

Pipes without kinks (self-intersections) can be meshed rather quickly, but I'm currently not special-casing pipe meshing (or sphere meshing, or cylinder meshing, or cone meshing, or box meshing etc.)

Making pipes is indeed quite an expensive operation. It's basically a Sweep1 with circular cross-sections.

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Poprad, Slovakia

Permalink Reply by Matt on February 21, 2010 at 12:58am

David,
Could we get a pipe component that can vary in width and height depending on it's length or it's intersection with neighboring geometry. I would be happy with the first two being parameters. Either way great plug-in.

Permalink Reply by Damien Alomar on February 21, 2010 at 8:08am

A pipe is just a glorified loft really, so if you want to vary the radius along the pipe then just create a series of circles, adjust them accordingly, and loft them. If you're looking for squishing/stretching then use elipses instead. In both casess you need to very careful of the rotation because the Loft function will try to "connect" the ends of the circles. So although they may look okay, if a circle is rotated 180 degrees from the one previous to it, there will be a lot of pinching in the loft.

Permalink Reply by Marcola on February 26, 2016 at 9:04pm