RingBuild
The RingBuild node is set up initially with 2 rings of vertices forming a cylinder. Each ring can be scaled, positioned and orientaed independently from each other using the scaleX, scaleZ, location and orientation fields.
The scaleX and scaleZ fields each have 2 floating point numbers, one for scaling the negative side and one for scaling the positive side of the dimension they control.
If the scaleX and scaleZ fields both equal 0, 0 for the first or last ring, a single vertex is specified instead of a ring of vertices.
The scale, rotation and translation fields transform all of the vertices generated by the BuildRing.
The numOfRingsToInsert field specifies how many rings will be inserted when the length button is incremented.
When the length button is decrimented the slected ring will be deleted.
If a RingBuild node is selected it will display the 5 control points for the slected
ring in the 3d window, however often we can only see 3 of them because 2 of the
control points are typically hidden by 2 of the other control points. The 4 red
control points are used for scaling the 4 sides of the rings and for orientating
the ring around the ring's location point. The
location point can be moved by dragging the yellow control point or when this point
is hidden, by dragging the red control point that is hiding the view of the yellow
point. The view in the 3d window can be centered to the yellow control point by
clicking
. Clicking
centers the view to the
selected red control point.
The control points are intuitive to drag but they can offer too much freedom. Sometimes we want to not be able to orientate the ring when we wish to only scale the ring. Unchecking the dragOrientation field prevents us changing the orientation of the selected ring when dragging any of the ring's control points. Likewise when locationY is unchecked the ring's Y component or height for the location of the ring can not be modified by dragging and when the locationXZ field is unchecked the X and Z components for the location can not be modified by dragging.
Holding down the control key prevents us from dragging any of the control points so this can be usefull if we want to only select a ring.
A ring build node can reference one or more part nodes. When referencing more than one part the rings can be portioned out to be owned by the different parts using the ownership field.
The list of values in the ownership field should corespond in the order of the list of referenceed parts, except last part in the list does not need to be specified by the ownership field because the remaining rings not specified will be owned by the last part.
To see this node being used see Creating an Avatar Using Immediate Editing