I'm having some trouble thinking this through I guess and could use some help. I'm trying to draw a dial for a rotary knob that only completes a 300 circle.

See attachment for diagram.

I draw the arc and the first tick mark (A), then rotary duplicate 10 times (B), then I change the first tick mark to the smaller style (C), then rotary duplicate it 100 times (D). Looks fine right?

There are 10 lines between large marks now, not nine, and therefore I cannot make every 5th line bold for clarity, my next step if I could get there.

I'm sure I'm overlooking something obvious but any help would be appreciated.

Bend Graduated Ruler to an Arc with Perpendicular Rules Lines?

It would be really awesome if one could:

-- draw a line to a desired scale length

-- associatively tick marks in a desired pattern of long/short alternating lines (as on a ruler/scale)

-- draw a circle or an arc of a desired diameter

-- select the start, middle, and ending points of the arc

-- associatively snap the arc and graduations to the curve, with the ticks maintaining perpendicularity

Hmmm, I doubt it is possible, but, I will try it just hopefully prove myself wrong.

OTOH, presume the line-bending to a curve might work, and the perpendicular ticks might go around, too.

One way I deal with the scale ticks is to draw a segment of what I need, and then copy left to right minus the final tick, then grab and re-color them.

Also, I beforehand, figure out how many color bands I need, then, say, if I want 5 colors, I copy the ruler ticks, color them, then grab and translate copy all less the final tick (when that is the scenario), and move on.

If Tim and Crew can find the rotary dial tickmark/rule to be a useful feature, it would be great if they would add an option to alternately colorize tickmarks. Maybe some intelligence built into the tickmark pattern would allow tthe user to lasso them, say, up to five bands, see a prompt to select the colors (either user-selected or color-wheel influenced by the computer), then translate copy/repeat.

Come to think of it, I think the paper user guide book shows how to bend a line having perpendicular tick marks.

It is suddenly re-emerging in my mind.

Happy Hunting!

Try superimposing one circle over the other. Segment one circle to have the radiating origins you need.

Then, use the Gripper to draw a line perpendicular out from the non-segmented circle. I am not sure, thought, that you can start snapped from a point on a segmented line, but then snap to a secondary curve as the origin of perpendicularity.

It might be nice if that can be implemented. However, an alternative may be to project the line out to yet a third, concentric circle, and ratiate perpendicular to that.

Come to think of it, this raises the idea:

Create three or four circles, all concentric, but out to different radii.

On different layers, assign the cutting/trimming circles with their corresponding alternating curves according to desired dial length.

Trim as desired.

Then, add another trimming circle of desired diameter to trim out the inner core of circles.

It might be possible to use the part history or just an undo (before proceeding on to subsequent steps) and trim the radials by resizing the diameter.

Or, maybe associatively trim radials with multiple circles' diameters.

Using a combination of Zero's and Zumer's concepts I think I found a fairly quick and intuitive method. 1. Draw the partial circle required. 2. Segment it into 10 pieces. 3. Segment one of those into 10 pieces and delete all others. 4. Offset that arc 3 times, once at each required tick mark length. 5. Segment the base arc into 10 pieces and turn on control points. 6. Draw only one of the longest tick marks at one end. 7. Draw the middle length tick mark at the center point perpendicularly. 8. Draw in 8 of the smallest tick marks perpendicularly. 9. Polar duplicate all of the curves 11 times in 10 step mode (for the required 300 dial). 10. Delete the unused curves. Sounds like a lot of work but's it's very straightforward and drawing perpendicular is not at all fussy.

No doubt there are many ways to approach this and speed of drawing it will certainly depend on ones cranial capacity : ).

See attached for diagram

Glad to be of assistance on your epic journey to the truth, hehehehe.

It would be nice, though, if plugins and some degree of access were possible or didn't require significant programming skills. It would be nice if it were possible to "teach" the program to analyze the user's actions and then offer up some programmatic "possible" macros or recordable/replayable routines. And, it would be nice if it were possible for users to share them and build an Open Source library.

Thanks, Zumer. I will try that, too!

The Path Duplicate tool is ideal for this sort of work.


Martin.

A good deal of planning


Which is exactly why any API access to create planning is crucial to expose or expose, since the more aggressive, creative, sharing-minded users and developers using VCP and Shark would likely share out (and, if reasonbly adept and feature-making) charge nominally for some kick-ass plugins.

It would be nice if some plugins enabled a quasi spreadsheet front end (OpenOffice.org, LibreOffice, Excel, and even .dbf) tools to allow "freezing" the program, accessing the layers structures, performing surgery (without dissociating the geometry) on the organization, tree, branches, and even appending more meta attributes to make it easier to manipulate layers even after "unfreezing" the program.

A kewl plugin might allow ad-hoc drag-and-drop cross-tab-like filtering and finding on layers to create deep, granular selection, exclusion, re-selection, etc., of layers to perform administrative clean-up of mind-bogglingly complicated models.

A kewl plugin might allow in-CE drag-and-drop of any layer or branch/tree into or out of another; selection of them; cloning and dropping-in of branches with intuitive layer name appending or renaming, and so on.

A kewl plugin might allow users who have patent-unencumbered ideas to quickly share them and keep them from being oppressively suppressed. So, in such as case, pre-built clock faces, pre-calculated path sweeping, multiple-geometry-sweeping, and so on could be achieved. I dare say such things might double or even quadruple interest in and regular, addictive use of VCP and Shark. Of course, it would help if people would pay for it instead of key-stealing. It would help of more showcasing of the capabilities were on a specific, prominent youtube channel, and if colleges and technical schools would offer it as an alternative to credits-earning.

Why, thank you. :)