denbeste@spdcc.COM (Steven Den Beste) (01/01/91)
OK, I'm trying to build a roller coaster track, see? I started by making some standard track sections and piecing them together, but you wouldn't believe how painstaking a task that is to get them to all mate properly. Lying in bed last night, I had a flash: "Extrude to path". All I gotta do is make an entity which is the cross section of the track (that is, the two rails) and a path which shows where the track goes, and voila! "Extrude to path" creates my track for me. (Further more, the crossbeam between the two tracks which must happen periodocally can get created with "replicate to path"! Voila again!) All fine and good, except that the damn thing doesn't work. If I follow the instructions in the book for making a "path" (their definition - a spline), when I try to use it to extrude I get one of the less useful error messages I've seen in a while: "Illegal parameters". Here's how to make it sort-of work: Ignore everything they say about creating a path. Instead, in the detail editor, create an axis and "add lines" to create a twisty-turny. Use THAT as your path, and it works like a dream. Well, not quite. Unfortunately, you can make "y" of your cross section follow the path, but there doesn't seem to be any way I can think of to make "banking turns". That is, the local "x" of the cross section always is level by global coordinates. What I'd really like to do is use the real "path" mechanism, which appears to retain all sorts of interesting information about orientation. Does anyone have any clues about this? (To the guy who asked: I'm afraid of roller coasters and won't come any nearer to one than I have to to watch my girlfriend ride. Think of this as a vicarious thrill.)