Thanks for the help so far everyone

I have got the hang of doing this on a straight line, now the complex bit is trying to do it on a spiral. Currently I am trying to turn the model on the left (spiral with even length lines) in the model on the right (spiral with lines increasing by XX per length)

Ideally what I would like to be able to do is select the first line (red) and then the last line (green) and be able to input something like "starting the with the first line make all the others increase in XXmm increments"

Here is the file itself so far.
spiral lines.skp

aaargh I feel like such a newbie!

I can manage to do what Tig and Pbacot have suggested and that seems to work ok on a straight line (but not on a curve or spiral), but I cannot seem to make Jeff's suggestion work. I have got the fredoscale plugin but cannot get it to do what I need.

So I set my line like this

Then using the tapering tool (tried both by box and target) select the line on the right and click on the bottom right and then to the top left and click

and all I get is this

I am obviously doing something wrong but I have no idea where I am making a mistake.

Is it possible to select a group of lines of equal length (as in the top group) and then tell them to lengthen by a fixed amount each time to create a stepped effect e.g. "previous length + 30mm" (as in the bottom group). It is ok to do manually for a few, but I need to do 100+ and would like to avoid the manual route

Any help is much appreciated

@jeff this has solved my issue My mistake was thinking that it was going to create construction points on the spiral, when it was actually changing the length of each component part to 50mm and so I just had to snap to the endpoint of each short length.

Many thanks to both of you for helping me to get this sorted out.

@unknownuser said:

use BezierSpline
http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?t=13563

once installed, right click on the spiral then go:
BZ convert to -> polyline segmentor (to divide by # of segments)

or polyline divider to divide by desired segment length

I have that installed but I don't seem to have those options. My only options from "BZ convert to" are "polyline" and "polyline divider for animation". If I try the divider for ani option, it places marks on the spiral but not at the specified intervals and they disappear if I switch to another tool (such as Draw Cpoint)

here is the file I think I must be doing something wrong but I just don't know what!

spiral.skp

I have tried your other suggestions and none of them seem to work for me. Attached is a picture of the spiral I am trying to divide.

As you can see in the image, the spiral is just 2D which is why I was hoping for a simple "select and divide" option. The 1001 bits tools just do nothing. I follow the steps and while I get no error, I also get no points appearing anywhere.

Thanks for the quick reply

I have just tried that and I am getting an "Unsupported Curve, aborting" error.

I have a flat surface with a spiral pattern on it that I wish to divide in equal portions. Normally I use the "divide" option on the context-menu but it is not there for a spiral. The spirals are created using both the displaced arc method and the curvemaker plugin. I can do it manually, but it is exceptionally time consuming.

Any help is much appreciated

Hi everyone, my name is Dave and I am a SU newbie. I started using it a couple of weeks ago and am still getting to grips with various points. While I like playing around with it for fun, my primary use is for modelling fibre optic chandeliers before actually manufacturing them.