Need Help Designing Fire Piston Cylinder and Cap

[DickB]

Next step is to make a half-cylinder pattern.

Here is a height map of a half-cylinder:



Download it to your computer (click on the thumbnail image to enlarge it, then right click and select Save Image As...) and put it somewhere handy. I have a folder for height maps.

Open Designer and click on File – Import – Import Image File. Under Source, click on From File. Browse to the half-cylinder height map and open it:



Click on Next. Click on the red lock icon to unlock (blue). Set the width to 1, the depth to .5, and the length to 5:



Deselect the Floor Edges checkbox. Click on Finish.

Pick a folder, or use the New Category button to make one. (I often create a category for a specific project.) Enter a name such as half cylinder and click Save.

Before we use this pattern, we need to cover the topics of Bit Optimization and Floor Feather. Those will come next.

Meantime, go through these steps. Play around with the options if you like to get familiar with them.

Extra credit: Google height map, click on Images, and find some grayscale graphics. (Careful – not everything that you see is a true height map!) Here is a good example:

http://www.gigamacro.com/blog/gigapi...rt-case-study/

Make a pattern out of it. (Hint: for this particular pattern, click Invert, then click the down arrow under Raise/Lower to lower it a bit. What happens?)

And you thought that you had to pay money to get a penny pattern! You might be surprised at what interesting height maps you can find and convert into patterns with Designer Basic only.