Good morning Pascal:
I was an Autocad user from 1993 until I defected to Rhino about 2 years ago (best move ever!). Even just being able to reach you when I have a problem sets Rhino apart from the miserable support that autocad had.
I use Rhino to analyze and reconstruct serious car crashes.
I scan wrecked vehicles into point clouds, scan crash sites with drone photography, and create undamaged versions of the vehicles to show the sequence leading up to the crash. Then I diagram everything in Rhino and even use Bongo a little for animation.
Hum3D is one of the many companies that makes good undamaged vehicles for this purpose. However, their tires and wheels are made of tens of thousands of polygons and waste processing power in my work.
I created a library of tires and wheels, starting 10 years ago, that are the specific size of the various tire sizes found on cars and trucks (like P245/75R16 on the sidewall of your tire).
In Autocad, when I came across a tire size that I did not have in my library as a block, I traced out the profile of the tire and then used the REVSURF command. This would give me a simple polygonal model of a tire and wheel that faithfully represented its dimensions without adding thousands of faces to the vehicle model.
In Autocad:
REVSURF command would create a surface by revolving the tire and wheel profile around an axis (pink below).
SURFTAB2 was the system variable that you adjusted which determined how many facets the revolution had (18 in the example below)
This would produce a mesh object for the tire and a separate mesh object for the wheel. I would then save them as a block named by the tire size.
I have been trying to figuring out how to do something similar in Rhino 3-D so I can add new tire model blocks that looks similar to those in my library file. I have experimented with the Revolve command and several others but I just can’t seem to mimic the process or or results that I achieved with the REVSURF command.
Could you please tell me what command you would use or steps you would take to model a simple tire and wheel like the one below?
Thanks for any help you can offer,
Don
