Radiant tutorial: Patch pipes

Last updated: 06/08/2008

Introduction:

This tutorial explains how to create pipes from patch meshes with thick walls and internal surfaces in Radiant.

A cylinder patch with a diameter of 128 units and a length of 512 units is used as the external surface of the pipe. An inverted clone of this cylinder with a reduced diameter is used as the internal surface.


Clone the cylinder.

Move the top row of vertices down.

Move the bottom row up.


Move the side rows in by eight units to create the inner surface. The internal and external surfaces should now be concentric as shown.

The pipe now requires end caps.

The end surfaces of the pipe is made from simple patch meshes.


Create a 3 by 3 patch mesh.

Collapse this into a 2*3 mesh by moving the top row of vertices over the centre row.

Move the vertices to form a 90° bend.

The patch is copied and rotated in steps of 90° three times to fill the end gap completely. The end set is cloned and flipped in the z-axis and moved to the other end of the pipe to complete the tube.


Copy and paste the 90° bend to fill the gap between the internal and external surfaces.

The pipe now bears the appearance of a solid-walled tube.
Copyright © 2008 Taiyo Rawle. This document is released under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/