Access Feature Details from a Curve Engine

[Jörg 29]

In one of the impeller examples that come with CAESES, there are labels at the top of the 3D view which visualize some section information at a specific radius.

 

This a a more general task, similar situations happen quite often in CAESES: You have generated a meta surface and now you want to know about some feature members at a specific location of this surface. Remember, "location" means at a specific abscissa value according to the coordinate system of the curve engine. So now, how can you access the feature information since the curve engine seems to keep all the secrets...?

 

The trick is a small new functionality that was introduced some months ago:

 

In a separate feature, you can simply ask the curve engine to give you the (e.g. 2D blade profile) feature at a specific location, see this screenshot:

 

Line 15 holds the interesting information:

FFeature::meanline section(engine.createFeature(where).castTo(FFeature::meanline))

In our example, we have a meanline feature definition that is used in a curve engine. Such a feature can be returned by the curve engine, and we use a reference (FFeature::meanline) with the name "section" to continue work with it.

 

This is probably a little bit advanced, but really great and powerful. The meta i.e. blade surface and your new feature work on the same data (curve engine) so that changes of the engine are no problem anymore, and all details of the underlying feature definition are available.

 

Some of us have been waiting quite a long time for such a functionality, but with CAESES 4.0 it's finally there!

 

Cheers

Joerg