External Elevator 2.skp (2.9 MB)
Does anyone know how to mirror a window from one side of a cylinder to the other? I want to make a window on each side of my outside elevator.
Also, I am having trouble creating a transparency in the rear of the elevator too. If you rotate it around you’ll see what I mean. Painting opacity at 20% doesn’t seem to be working.
1 Use the Mirror plugin, or copy then scale -1 or flip component (R-click menu) and move into place
2 Have you applied a transparent material to BOTH sides of the window pane? It only works one way otherwise, like a one-way mirror
Have you both inside and outside walls to make transparent?
Just been looking at your model again. The ‘window’ hasn’t cut a hole in the end wall.
I’m not sure how to apply transparent material inside the window since I can’t tell where the borders are there. The window is really just a transparent section of the cylinder wall. So I don’t know if moving it into place is the best way to do things. I might need another animation or tutorial on how to use the TIG mirror plugin.
And furthermore, there seem to be at least two more circular faces in the end wall of the cylinder. You need to cut windows in all of them too.
i think you may also (to make life more difficult) now have too many nested component/group levels - takes a lot of double clicks to get down to a face in the end wall.
Would you like to review via Skype? I’m free for half an hour or so? If so, please call me in next few minutes.
Calling now…
External Elevator 2.skp (2.9 MB)
elevator 2
As amended following our Skype chat.
Will do more on it tomorrow to try to simplify heirarchy, and get dimensions back to round numbers where it seems sensible.
External Elevator 2a.skp (2.5 MB)
External Elevator 2b.skp (2.4 MB)
Thanks.
Keep in mind that we are getting quite a bit of interdependency between the elevator, the channel and the building all having to fit together, so I think anything more than a 1/4", or even 1/8", variance in some cases, could cause alignment and function problems. The math will get tricky in some cases. The track widths, step depth, elevator door depth and width (there are actually 4 doors, of 9" each so that they all fit in the circular space of the cylinder when opened, plus a 2" black safety sensor bumper in front).
Still, I agree there is no particular reason, say, for the elevator side windows to be 8’ X 2’ 10 13/16" instead of 8’ X 3’, other than my trouble measuring 3’ along a curved surface.
I pulled off the back compound to work inside and found a bug mess, especially in the front wall. I fixed what I could, let solid detector and SU fix some of the rest, and gave up on some things. Apparently, all my rotation of the new super-component Things to Rotate was off center more than a few times and that has messed with the thin cylinder walls. Some stray geometry I previously erased actually was connected inside and was messing things up too. The sides are blending into the rings too. And finally, only one side window can be seen out of as well as into.
What I ultimately need is a cylinder that freely rotates within: rings, motor mounts, gears, and track and block segment. While the track and block are not technically connected to the elevator, it is easier to rotate them with the rings than to try to align the track between the gears each time. It is also easier to connect future sections of track and mounts later along the channel.
I’ll need to be able to rotate the motor, gears, track and block off the perpendicular to the long axis of the elevator too, up to 12 degrees (roughly).
So, then there ought to be, I think, 3 super-components:
- Cylinder and everything inside
- Rings, swivels, motors, gears, track/block segment
- Motors, gears, track/block segment
And, of course, I need the whole thing to be selectable for copying into the main models.
Thanks again for all your help.
Now, back to the first floor…
John -
I have to run out to another meeting, but I wondered if you got a few minutes, you could tell me how to mirror the wall corner component I copied from the other side of the 1 floor and pasted to the left side. The model is already way too big to post on the forum, so I’m sending it here.I don’t know if TIG mirror is appropriate…unless you think it is better to do the entire right side of components that will have to be mirrored to the left side and do it all at once the way we did the elevator island. There will be columns, walls and a few other things that will need to be mirrored to the other side, before I start getting into specifics for the floor’s left and right sides. Before I do that, however, I’ll also need to create a mirror of the entire basic floor layout for the Brooklyn side from the current Manhattan side.
I think I might need a short animation on mirroring so I can follow along slowly until I finally get it (sorry to be so dense).
Talk to you later. Thanks for your help. Scott Baker
Happy to do it in half an hour or so, or later in evening if I miss you earlier. Try calling me any time after 6:30pm UK time; if I’m eating, will call you back as soon as I’m free.
Try this tutorial - I haven’t viewed it, but it should give you the essentials. I always use the
option to mirror about a plane, so you pick a point, then two axes to define the plane about which to mirror. I find that predictable.
Sorry, link I found from Google is broken - I put it here, but just found it doesn’t work - i get blank page.
Try this instead - it did work for me:
Sorry, but I don’t see a link to it.
I attached it to the email.
Trying to go through the tutorial now, but it is too small to see or cut off when I make it full screen.
Well, I got it to work, but I had to use the rotate tool after it was mirrored too…twice.
The video example is not so good because they use a featureless cube that looks the same mirrored vs. original anyway.
I think I will do the whole right side of the floor that needs to be mirrored and then get help on mirroring everything at once, then the whole floor together.
That sounds good.
Sorry, but the email had no attachment either.
Working on fixing the power units rotation and origins. Will be a while - few minutes to an hour, depending on how I get on!
The front and rear units have to be unique components, I think, otherwise they behave identically - which is what was happening with the original. [EDIT] though I’ve just thought of a way of fixing that in the formula]
Have restructured the outside elevator a bit, and rejigged the rotations. The two power trains are now, I believe, correctly centred, and are separate components at the top level, but both with same ‘innards’. They differ only in component axis, one being rotated 180 degrees in blue from the other (not mirrored - that would swing them in opposite directions on tilt, and would, as I found the hard way, override any initial placement you make before making them DCs).
[EDIT] I found I had left a duplicate ring at the front - this version has it deleted. And the front unit renamed from Power Unit #1 to Power unit front.
Elevator - outside JWM DC v1.4.skp (1.9 MB)
The whole elevator is now a component, not a group, the rings have a ‘up’ arrow on their tops (which is easily removable - you may or may not want to keep it, or show it some other way, but it should be useful for testing purposes at least), and they now rotate with the power train. And the DC options are now properties of the whole elevator, not a subcomponent of it - select the elevator as whole, and you can open the DC Options with a R-click.
I’ve also slightly changed the directions of the rotations. Positive values, as normal in SU, signify counterclockwise rotations looking down the axis, so rotation around Y movers the rings and power train clockwise viewed from the front of the elevator (‘down’ the Y axis being a view from the back of the elevator). And positive values of tilt now rotate the powertrain and track counterclockwise around blue viewed from the top of the power train.
I tried lowering the height of the Swivel component and moving the other parts ‘down’, but the track support blocks get dangerously close to the cylinder, so have reverted that change. You could gain perhaps a couple of inches here, but the 3.5" that I tried had the blocks actually touching the top of the cylinder.
Will try to work next on animating the door open/close, with either just two positions, or perhaps several - will try that if i get two position to work.
External Elevator with dynamic components v.1.4.skp (1.9 MB)
Thanks. It’s easier to use now too.
There is a problem, however with the rear ring. It swivels with the motor and goes off axis and into the cylinder. See attached .skp
Also, only the arrow on the rear ring moves with the motor. The arrow on the front ring moves in the opposite direction when the ring is rotated with the motor.
Sorry, must have sent you a partially changed version. The one I currently have, which was what I thought I sent, works fine. Sorry.
Here’s current one:
I’m free for a Skype call now if it would be helpful. If so, call me (any time up to midnight UK - 7pm NY time I think). Anyway, any time in next 2 hr
PS. OOPS, no it doesn’t! Wrong grouping heirarchy. Will fix shortly and send again. Wrong one in this post deleted until i get fix and repost it here
Fixed, and give a suffix a so you can see it is a different file.
Hmmm. I see what happened. It saved by default to the wrong location. When I didn’t change the name, I didn’t realise I was sending an older version.
AND I hadn’t quite fixed it either!
This time I have’t had to duplicate front and rear assemblies. The rear copy has an extra 180 rotation added around blue axis to get things started the right way round.
Elevator - outside JWM DC v1.4a.skp (1.9 MB)
PS. Because the swivel is round, it doesn’t need to rotate. But I could put it in the power train component if you want it to.
Remind me how long the inside elevator is? I’m just about to re-create it from the external one.
Internal Elevator 2.skp (2.0 MB)
It’s 9’ 5 9/16". I wouldn’t want to change that much since we’ve already created the elevator shafts to fit them and this is a practical size. You can shorten them by 1/16, so then it would be 9’ 5 1/2" 
The front door assembly should be the same as on the external elevator.
Won’t need to Skype today. I’m still working out details on the girders.