Building "Round" Things

[Depth386]

Hi folks, I would like to get the community to explore building round objects.

 

There has been one excellent example where you can see a few curves in Capnbub's CB3 ship (the bridge) and his CB30 ship (bridge + lower-front half donuts with glow) Take a look here: https://www.avorion.net/forum/index.php/topic,1013.0.html

 

I would like to see two things:

 

1) A User Guide in the User Guides section for things like Circles, Cylinders, Domes or Spheres, Torus...

 

2) Tools inside the game's Build Mode added as features to assist in this.

 

I have done the most basic thing so far, I figured out the math for a proper octagon where all sides are equal.

Take a look at the image below, it assumes you start with a normal 2 x 2 starting cube for your ship or station.

 

I hope to inspire a great thing here  :)

This is important for truly beautiful ships and stations.

[player_0005327]

That's a great ship you linked, really cohesive design, looks good. Building curves isn't that hard, just use the smallest grid size and the 'match block' function to make your triangles the right size. Here's the tail end of one of my ships, I think my next one might be a big sphere. Hate bonking into things when I turn around.  ::)

 

[Depth386]

Match Block function gives you same size blocks but that is not in fact what leads to a proper round shape.

 

A perfect octagon (or any perfect polygon for that matter) has all of it's faces the same length.

When you place a Triangle "Edge" brick, you are specifying the height/width of it but not the actual angled line's length.

You might remember from math class, this angled side is called the Hypoteneuse (i probably spelled it wrong)

The length of the Hypoteneuse "H" is equal to the square root of the sum of the width squared and the length squared.

 

H = Sqrt ( L^2 + W^2 )

In the case of a 2x2 Triangle, the Hypoteneuse works out to be:

H = Sqrt ( 2 ^ 2 + 2 ^ 2)

H = Sqrt ( 4 + 4 )

H = Sqrt ( 8 )

H = 2.8284

 

That's why the rectangles need to be those funny numbers when the Triangles are still simply "2x2" in Avorion terms.