I know this was about nesting and a great exercise, I'm still trying to grasp the concept of making a bowl this post helped me alot, I'll do as you have told me in the past....I'll play with it...lol
Been dabbling with an advanced version of my "Radial Vector Generator", to incorporate height map stroking of vector paths. Still a long ways to go, but as a rough test, hard coded the parameters of the inside of the bowl, with the following assumptions:
* Wood thickness: 0.75"
* Base: 0.5" thick, with 2" radius.
* Rise of the sides beginning at 2" with x=0" at that point: x^2 (essentially a parabola)
The result is the attached 5 segments. When imported, "Uncheck Floor Edges". When including in project, "Invert", "Feather: None", Depth 0.75, Height 999...
Not sure how well these will carve, as the carving bit will have to "trench" pretty deep at times, without the benefit of the feather function...
Someone earlier in the thread pointed out that you needed A / B type rings so that you had enough overlap so that each higher ring sat on the one below. That was dead on and what is reflected in the first file I posted in this thread.
Big thanks to bergerud on your examples. That allowed me to get past the block I was having in nesting more than two rings. I took one of your examples and created the "B" set that is offset by .5 inches. This should allow the inside feathers to match up as you alternate rings from the "A" nest and the "B" nest.
I've not carved this yet and will need to place some tabs before carving. As this was a class participation project, attached is a .mpc with the alternating nested ring sets.
Donnie
You might try double sided carpet tape on a sled instead of using tabs. (I wonder how the piercing will work. You may have to razor the pieces apart.)
I'm interested in your methods of vector generation. Is this going to develop in a drawing tool for Designer users? I tried importing your image files into Designer and found they look great! I'd love to see a paint program even if just a simple one that would draw gray scale vectors like your images. As an example a pencil could have a drop down menu where line width would select different depth gray scale mapped shapes such as full round, half round, triangle, rectangle and maybe a dotted line represented by spheres. Drawing with one of the selected tools would produce nice clean edged shapes that could be saved as Png images and then imported into Designer as 3d shapes. Adding your radial tools would be icing on the cake! A guy like me can only dream but it looks like your very capable of making such a thing a reality.
RocketMan,
Am not sure how familiar you are with my "Radial Vector Program", but it essentially allows one to script the generation of complex line drawings that can be imported into designer. The concept is that (at least for me) it's far less tedious to set up a script, input the appropriate parameters, and have the script generate the vectors, than it is to try and create a repetitive number of vectors in Designer by hand. I'm trying to create a similar tool with stroke paths, such that a script, driven by parameters, can generate the necessary complex height map(s).
Whereas with the "Radial Vector Program" I used VB6, with the height map program, I'm using a much more modern tool set, namely HTML5 and Javascript. Somewhat surprisingly, Javascript is faster (at least on Chrome) than compiled VB6 ...
Still a ways to go, though, but the bowl example provides a good test case for me. Ie, the definition of the bowl can be parameter and script driven (ie, wood thickness, base thickness, base radius, and rise rate of the sides of the bowl), and the result will be a set of rings that can be imported into designer as PNGs. This can all be done in designer manually with the 2d/3d toolset, but like drawing a multitude of repetitive vectors, having to manually calculate all the factors and make the various height map sweeps in Designer is tedious...
R, Jon
I like your ideas. Another nice thing about HTML 5 and JavaScript is your not limited by any one platform. It's amazing how powerful and fast programs scripted can be.
There's an abundance of "on line" editors springing up. I still prefer to use most of them off line as I know I can access it when internet is not available and I don't have to worry about the site hosting it closing down for good as some have in the past.
Please keep up the great work.
Brad