There are two random pipes(Red and Green)
How to find the Blue one(tangent with the other two)?
Design_Q.3dm (264.4 KB)
There are two random pipes(Red and Green)
How to find the Blue one(tangent with the other two)?
Given 2 pipes there are many possible ways to place a 3rd of the same radius tangent to both.
Here’s one way to find one of them-
-Draw the blue Line Perpendicular to 2 Curves between the 2 pipe center lines.
-Copy both center lines to the midpoint of this line
-rotate each of them 90 degrees about the blue line to get offset directions
-shift each of them by the radius along these directions
-draw the circle tangent to these 2 offset curves with the given radius
-extrude this circle
1 Like
Thank you Daniel!
I’ve tried your method. It works well with “two pipes existing and find the third pipe situation”.
But this method will keep the position of Line Perpendicular to 2 Curves, and it will slightly change the axis of other two pipes. So that when I have three and more neither parallel nor intersect lines in 3D space and I need to find two Line Perpendicular to 2 Curves and get two groups of two pipes. Then the position of second line will be calculated twice which is different with each other.
Do you have any idea to solve this problem?
Design_Q2.3dm (682.2 KB)
Maybe another better way to ask this question: Can we keep the pose of two random pipes fixed and find the third pipe tangent with them?
That’s exactly what my post above shows. The 2 input pipes are not moved.
If you have 3 or more fixed pipes and you want to find another pipe tangent to all of them you can use Kangaroo. I’ll post an example later.