Thursday 19 June 2008

Large scale casting process (notes to self)

I believe I have stumbled upon a process that may revitalise the large scale construction industry. PRevious processes have rarely been able to produce ironwork of spans much greater than 10m, larger structures were possible but extremely limited as the casting facilities of proportions in excess of 10m tend to have been for defined purposes and thus are very specific sizes, e.g. the most common is perhaps the 20mx20mx0.5m plate.

I have this evening devised a mechanism that allows, through careful restriction of the casting process, complex castings of dimensions that are a fraction of the larger cuboid casting moulds and thus allow the casting of a product that is for example 1/10th the width and 2/3rds the height and depth of the cast in which it is produced. Thus allowing the enterprising engineer the ability to cast a product that measures 25mx30mx12m from a cast that is 40x40x60.

Further experiments remain to be conducted and the testing of the casting detail checked thoroughly but early signs are good though it is clear that the finite limit to small detail work is somewhat larger under this model and proportional to the scale of the casting mould used.

(( to translate: I have been playing with sculpties and the manipulation of the mesh to effectively scale the sculpt within the bounding box. Not rocket science I know but an interesting wheeze. So where a typical mesh spans 256 sub units of its bounding box in all 3 dimensions, if the mesh is then scaled to be 50% of this then the resultant sculpt wil only ever be half of its bounding box in any dimension. So why do we care? Well the huge prims that are define in the SL universe are of bizarre and rarely useful dimensions but if I take a 40x40x60 box and then turn it into a sculpt whose mesh is constrained at 50% in all directions the sculpt would thus appear to by 20x20x30, thus we have almost arbitrary control over the scale. Of course, there is a down side. The sub units are defined by the bounding box. and thus the smallest distance that two points can be separated by is 1/256th of the bounding dimension or in my example 20mx20mx30m roughly 8cmx8cmx12cm limiting detail.

Is this really of any use? I think so I'll play more soon, and post some shots that might make this gibberish more sensible. Appologies to those for whom this is old news :-) ))

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