Any idea?

[Dimitri]

I have a simple question: how can we place a cylinder-beam between two randomly put in the space spheres so that the beam's top and bottom faces be aligned exactly with the centers of the spheres?

I came across this need when trying to illustrate in 3D space a net of connections, as it is shown very roughly in the attached image.

Let say it in another way: we have ten points (spheres) randomly dispersed in the working space and we want to connect all to all with beams between them in a visually accurate way (that's to say by having the beams put accurately aligned with the centers of each pair of spheres which they connect). How can we get across such a task?

[micheus]

Hi Dimitri, maybe this would be a new option to be automatized by ggaliens.

Bellow is how I would solve this problem using the official Wings3d. I used a squared pipe instead of cylinder because I think it was the best way to implement the solution since we have a lot of quads in the spheres and them can easily converted to cylinder by adding edges and using Circularise. I hope this help you:

[Dimitri]

Hi Micheus... thanks a lot for the video. I will try the solution you propose.

Btw, like the music theme of the video too... like your effort in explaining in a so devoted way.

[Dimitri]

Micheus hello again… I did some experiments with the snap… it is working fine (below I am putting some results). The only problem is that in the case you want to make objects with a high amount of connecting beams, there the whole process becomes very tedious and difficult. It is easy to imagine what the situation would be if you have to do so many moves for placing –exactly- each beam between two point-spheres, in a case where you have to connect, say, some one hundred point-spheres. It would be good, indeed, having a command which would create with one click a connecting beam (a cylinder with a varying thickness) between two selected objects.

Wings can be an excellent tool for creating 3D visualizations and diagrams for various explanation purposes in the field of science, mathematics, statistics etc, so having some such small but very useful commands it would be very helpful I think.

Imagine, the flat connections in the circle of the second image be built in three dimensional space, in a sphere… the visualization potential which could arise by such combinations would be amazing!

(the renderings have been made in Blender)

[sara736]

Thank you for the extensive instructions. By habit, I don't use non-latin characters in my file names anyway. So using Wings built-in dialog works fine for me :-)

[ggaliens]

ManifoldLab has many different provisions for making this all easy.

Rod Throwing.
Scatter Functions.

1,2,3 done.