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| Figure 1 - Improved STOR 22 Beta Interface |
Click the properties toolbar button to open the standard properties or the trapezium toolbar button to open the extra properties or use the dragable splitter bars, see figure 1.
It's now possible to flat shade or hidden line render the square-to-round transformer which greatly helps visualize the offsets and the top and bottom angles. You can access the view menu by right button clicking the drawing canvas or by clicking the views toolbar button as shown in figure 3. Flat shading is very applicable to the Square to Round transformer as the appearance of the facets is very difficult to remove from the real work piece. Basically, the render algorithm finds the angle between the face normal and the viewing direction and if the angle is greater than 90 degrees then it is a back face and gets rendered first and less than 90 degrees a front face. The intensity of the colour is a function of the angle. I will introduce a smoothing function at some point especially for the ConeT application where work peice is, so often, rolled and you do not see the facets that are inherintaly produced by the triangulation process used in the software. There's more on face normals and the angle between vectors here: Face Normals
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| Figure 2 a to d) Different ways to render the transformer with the show face normals and show axes options selected. |
Figure 2 a,b,c and d show the cartesian axes intersecting at the origin (0,0,0) where all the offsets are measured from the origin. The axes are color coded: X fuchsia, Y lime, and Z aqua. Being able to visualize (and plot out for the sheet metal worker) the direction of the offsets in the front, plan and isometric views will help avoid 'handing' mistakes. Figure 2a and b are the front elevation and plan view respectively which are shown flat shaded with face outlines. Figure 2c shows the transformer shaded with no face outlines and 2D show the hidden line method which is useful when you do not wish to waste ink when plotting but still need the clarity of hidden lines.
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| Figure 3 - Right button click the canvas to pop up the views menu |
You can still export the transformer as 3D DXF polyface and render in your favorite CAD or render application.
You can print the shaded transformer from the application using the print complex command. See the following PDF examples. Note it is also possible to change the material colour using the standard colour dialog. You can use up to 13 (of 16) custom colours and once added to the palette they will be available every time you open the application. The first 3 colours (Steel,Copper,Brass) are reserved by the application.
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| Figure 4 - From the MenuBar View -> Material Colour. (Change the Pen Colour for the face outline colour) |
Tested in Firefox 3: FireFox homepage