3D textures needed

[tim]

No, not texture by bitmap, texture by making a profile and push/pull and trimming to an outline.

Imagine designing a house with board and batten siding. It's easy to draw the profile for board and batten. It would be easy to pull it out to make a simple rectangular wall. Now imagine you want a gable wall (let alone a more complex shape) - you could do it manually by various means of course.

I can almost see how to do this but I'm busy actually building a house and I don't like trying to write Ruby code so I'm hoping somebody else will like the idea.
This is a faint idea for how it might work-

On the left is the wall and the profile (the tiny bit near the origin)
Middle shows the profile repeated across the wall and pulled up
Right is battens trimmed to shape of wall.
Extra points for handling holes - ie windows - in the wall, re-entrant shapes, curved walls etc. If anyone can make it work on a sphere and spring I'll be seriously impressed.