@unknownuser said:

I am curious to know if it could be useful in a 'practical' 3D design life.

There are some operations I can think of that cannot be done (at least easily, when not impossible) without using this Ruby.
The first is a bent text (text put on a path) as shown in earlier posts in this thread.
Those letters can be many different things... very promising.
Another possibly new operation is bending entities whose section profiles change along their lengths.
The Ruby can be used as lofting tool or sweep tool. Now we can make curvy legs of certain tables very easily.

In any case, good control on how bending take place is the key. Cannot wait to try it.

@unknownuser said:

i'm not really following this.. what do you mean by 'you are not getting your threads right at any points of the spiral except at the bottom' ?

Oh this is a solved problem... sorry I didn't see the solution has been posted. Missed your model in post #8.
I saw the image in post #11 and thought it's an ongoing problem.
I was refering to blah11's quoted image in post #11.

While I was looking at Jeff's model, an odd thought came down to me.
This whole thing can be done without using Ruby - I'll explain.
BTW you can do it as elements horizontally lying down (as in the image in post#11) with this method.

What's happening here is very logical.
You are using a Ruby that keeps a section profile always "upright standing".
Imagine what the profile could do when the path is also vertical...
And look carefully Blah 11, you are not getting your threads right at any points of the spiral except at the bottom (as in the 3rd image).
The solution for the problem is, I assume, to make the reference path stand up and then re-apply the ruby.
Hope the images will explain it better.

Hi Goh, first of all congratulations on this clever toolset and thanks for your hard work.

Few questions and suggestions from me.

1. where should the folder "1001bit" be placed in case of Macintosh? There is no on Macs.
2. isn't it easier if we can just put "1001bit_tools.rbs" and "1001bit" folder in "Plugin" folder as we do with every other ruby scripts?
3. 1001bit has very comprehensive UI, yet it's unbelievable that the toolset doesn't have toolbars. It takes too much time to get to "create door" command following the tree structure. SU's personal shortcut is not very capable either.

Thank you for your sample model, Lewis.
I never imagined it was that big... the 18MB almost killed my PC.
Now I know what I did wrong. I turned "use sun for shading" off.
I discovered that either "shadow" or "use sun for shading" has to be on (even with both on, I got the same result).
IOW the sun has to be there somehow, but shadows has to be erased by setting "dark slider" to the most right.
Doesn't make much sense to me but it works.

poster-takesh h

Hi Lewis, you are a busy guy.
I get both "the edges bug" and "horizontal plane error".
I tried this depth map thing a while ago and immediately I encountered the above problems.
Then I figured this cannot be done, but look at what you guys accomplished here...
I downloaded and used Lewis's style setting but got the same problem.
It could be my videocard problem (I use GeForce though).
There might be some workarounds for "horizontal plane error", but those edges are very difficult to get rid of.

BTW I found a nice tutorial of how those depth map should be applied to the original image.
This should save some of Lewis's time.
http://photography-on-the.net/forum/showthread.php?t=102294

Did you ever find a setting to get rid of edges, jackson?

poster-takesh h