I have offten wished that I could control to vertex mapping and meshing of RULESURF. If you make a ruled surface between two closed loops, like a rectangle and a circle, depending on how they were drawn, the surface can intersect itself. Then you have to mess around with changing the order of the vertices in the polylines and such.
Zoltan
I have long given up mesh surfaces for solids but before solids were I had such problems with it
I set up arrays of polylines in blocks that I could substitute one for another till I had all the points needed then exploded the blocks and gathered the polylines in consecutive order and ran this
(DEFUN C:CN3 (/ A B C D E F G cn cnt L1 L2 s1 s2) ;
(PRINC "CRITS TO CONN...")
(SETQ A (SSGET (list (cons 0 "*p*line*")))
B (SSLENGTH A )
s1(ssadd)
s2(ssadd)
cnt 0
cn 0
L2 b
);SETQ
(repeat b
(SETQ B (1- B)
C (SSNAME A B)
D (entnext c)
E (entget d)
F (cdr (assoc 0 e))
cnt (max cn cnt)
cn 0
)
(while (/= f "SEQEND")
(setq g (CDR (ASSOC 10 e))
pt (trans g c 1)
d (entnext d)
e (entget d)
cn (1+ cn)
f (cdr (assoc 0 e))
)
(IF (LISTP L1) (SETQ L1 (cons pt L1)) (SETQ L1 (list pt)));if
);while
);repeat
(command "_3dmesh" l2 cnt (car l1))
(FOREACH F (cdr L1) (COMMAND f) )
(command "_erase" a "")
'DUN
);DEFUN
you have to make sure that all polylines have the same number of points (you can move two points to the same place) and a are the same direction, and have no more than 256 points or polylines as that is/was? the limit. I was able to make some pretty complex objects using this method.
(http://hometown.aol.com/dragonwlkr/images/fntn.jpg)
The Fountain, stand, and Base are each made up of such meshes