helical gears

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aplesch's picture

The real advantage of gear modelling in 3d is that gears in a mesh do not have to parallel each other. It is posible to demonstrate how gears can transfer rotation (and forces) to orientations other than the driving gear. This kind of transfer is possible by use of helical gears.

Helical gears have their teeth at an angle to the axis of the gear but are otherwise very similar to spur gears. In fact, profiles through a helical gear are all identical and rotated by an amount proportional to their distance from the front. 

Based on the 3d involute gears program, helical gears therefore did not require too many changes. The main idea is that instead of just extruding the gear profile in one step, now several quads in the direction of the helical angle are generated, with the correct amount on distorttion (rotation) based on the width of each segment.

Here is the logo which is quite similar to the 3d involute gear logo but has the rotated extrusion and some smaller changes including the addition of a third gear. It takes quite a long time to run.

The triangles across the teeth were qute noticable. Changing the crease angle by editing the x3d helped. 

This update take advantage of how scope works in logo, eg. that variables are available to subprocedures.

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Andy's picture

Complication

Using Logo to write one is possble, and the SET command should work. 

I was actually thinking about in javascript to handle this so users do not need to worry. The complication is that the Color also uses the same index, and if coordinate index is going to be changed, I will need to keep a copy to the Color index, or even do the same to remove duplicated colors...(in fact, colors are mostly the same or repeating the 16 built-in colors. Removing duplicates can reduce file size).

At the moment, colors and coordinates are using the same index. If changed the coordinate index, x3dom should report errors. But if PCOFF (PenColorOff) for FACE, then no Color node will be created but only Material node. This way changing the coordinate index should be fine.

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