Curvy 3D Forum

Lathes are symmetrical by default with one curve of course, but have you thought about adding radial repeat/symmetry for the line tool to go with the lathes? Radial repeat would keep the same orientation but create copies evenly placed along the radius of the point you started the line based on the view you drew it from... vs either mirroring the original plus each copy or changing angle of copies based on the point along the radius or surface normal of the lathe you had selected when drawing it perhaps.

In example, radial repeat could have been used to draw all the legs of that jellyfish example I have seen all at once. Where as radial symmetry would be perfectly suited to creating the bars on a stereotypical cartoon bird cage.

I'm thinking that the way that the program currently works that it might be easist to implement only as usable from top view or as a special append mode to an existing symmetrical lathe, but I could be wrong. I was just thinking that how the program tends to create a new axis per object might make it tricky in some circumstances if no axis was pre-determined. perhaps the axis in radial mode could be the center of the current view if not appending to a lathe.

I understand if it's too impractical to add... just thinking out loud

The simplest version of this would just take the selected object and the Y axis and rotate a number of copies into place. It is quite a common task and worth automating.

I suspect I could make a script to do this...

Using a Lathe to shape the radial copies is a good idea, but rather more complex to add - so I expect you would just make a simple radial pattern and move it into place afterwards.

Could this be similar to doing an array of an object along a path? That would be useful I would think.

Yes array along path would be similar, probably just using the object's parent as the path.

The trickiness comes when you also want to rotate the object to fit to the path's twists and turns. I think in that case you might use a Loft object as the 'path' and rotate the duplicated object to lie on the loft surface. There might be a better way to control that.

That's what I was thinking. Child will snap to the parent's face's normals direction. I don't know, I don't code heh.

I'll have to give this a think after 3.0