In help file:
Patch Surface Options: “Sample point spacing”
The nominal 3-D distance between points sampled from input curves.
Minimum of 8 points per curve.
[Question]
I am difficult to understand what “the nominal 3-D distance” means.
I thought to “the nominal 3-D distance” = Straight-line distance?
Did I understand correctly?Patch.zip (19.3 KB)
Not Lowell, but to me (maybe I’m wrong), Patch is fitting the surface to points sampled along any curves and not the curves themselves. In dividing a curve, if you input a fixed length, there will be an odd division left at the end. If you want the curve to be divided in even intervals all the way along from start to end, you then expand or contract the specified distance a little to allow that to happen. Thus the “nominal” distance (the one you specified) is not the exact distance, but it’s the nearest close possibility…
–Mitch
Ahh, the telephone rang while writing this and Lowell beat me to it…
Probably - I’m not the programmer. But parametric distance would vary along the curve according to parametrization, so again logical would be physical distance… I’ll let @lowell or Dale answer this definitively though…
Is there some reason you care about this?
It is distance along the curve, but if you’re using spacing big enough for that to matter, you won’t get what you want anyway so its really not significant which it is.
In your example above there are relatively big areas of the green curve about which you have no information, meaning Patch won’t be trying to fit to those parts of the curve.
difficult to understand.
along the curve.
