Curved to Fit - A TKE MicroTool
Curved to Fit - A TKE MicroTool |
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The world would be a very dreary place if we did not have curves to look at. Curves in nature, to a large extent, are what define the difference between the inanimate - crystalline, sharp edged, craggy, flat - from the animate - spirals, soft curves, features, graceful and ungraceful alike. This is not quite fair, of course. The world of physics certainy has its ellipses and parabolas, even its perfect circles. but the world of biology has spirals, non-conical curves. Vive la difference!!
Punch! uses curves in lots of things. You can create surfaces in the 3D Workshop that curve in one or two dimensions, so they lay the basis for curves in all 3D objects. Many of Punch!'s tooled objects, like stairs and railings, can be curved. Some, like paths, could not be not-curved until AS18 came. Now, many objects can be either curved or straight, or have curved or straight edges. One exception is walls and decks, for several software reasons, but they can be approximated by many straight pieces. There are still a few holdouts, and we'll take a closer look at how curves work with particular objects after we understand a bit more about what curvature in a computer means.
Up to this point curves have been a bit problematical in Punch!. You can create a curved object, but changing that object later is often a problem. Everyone who has used Punch! for a while has run up against the way paths seem to be almost perverse in the way that they cannot be easily straightened out and made to follow a simple curved path. There has been no way to merge curved and straight parts of a path in a single piece. As we will see, the reasons for this lie in the software, and how a simple approach to how curves can be specified will solve these problems.
Curved to Fit gives the user a simple, graphical method for drawing pleasing curves, for adjusting them when the plan changes, and for combining the straight with the curved as is done in the real world. The house where I grew up was on a suburban street corner; the sidewalk was straight until it got to the corner, and then it swept around the corner in a graceful 6' radius quarter circle before straightening once more. I cannot make that work in Punch! in a single piece, but with Curved to Fit I can.
Curved to Fit, as of version 1.2.0, is fully compatible with all Punch! PowerTool-enabled versions through level 12.x, including AS5000-12 and Master Landscape Pro-12. See the Compatibility page for more details.
Curved to Fit and the contents of this help file are
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