About 2 days ago I was modelling, by hand, a tangent ogive nosecone for a rocket. That was a massive pain in the ass. So I made an addon to do it for me, as well as a bunch of other cone-like shapes commonly used in aerodynamic nosecones. Link to the addon: https://github.com/brickmack/Advanced-Cones. Currently supports tangent ogives, secant ogives, prolate spheroids (aka “elliptical”), parabolics, power series, and Haack series cones. The tangent ogive is spherically blunted too, if you don’t want blunting set sphere radius to zero. Also, you can use the tangent ogive with ogive rings set to 1 to get a spherically blunted cone. To use, just press space and enter the name of the shape you want, it should come up, then use the sliders. The wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nose_cone_design provides a good overview of the mathematics involved, and what each parameter does for each shape, or you can just mess around with it I guess. Screenshot of the shapes in their default settings
Note that this is literally a 3 day old addon, not so thoroughly tested. Bugs exist. It at least works fine-ish on 2.75 and 2.78
Advanced Cones has been updated. Large number of bugfixes, some text changes. Prolate hemispheroid now has a “smooth tip” option. Objects correctly spawn at 3d cursor location, not scene center. The latest version (1.2) is compatible with Blender 2.80, users of 2.79 should use v1.1.1.
Really nice work! As a future request, I’d love if this was added to the Add menu so that it can be accessed from there. It’s a little more convenient for the average user than trying to search for them by name.
Yes, v1.3 will include that. Its almost done now, just working on documentation. The previous couple updates were more motivated by fixing severe bugs and getting something that would work under 2.80, so sort of a rush job. 1.3 adds itself to the Add Mesh menu, supports both 2.7x and 2.8x with the same code, has a marginally more user-friendly interface, fixes even more bugs, adds one new cone shape (spherically blunted cone), and has an actually useful readme for instructions and examples.
It is possible that you are already planning to do what I am about to request, but just in case I am going to ask anyhow. Would it be possible to place all the ‘Advanced Cones’ together as a submenu under the ‘Add’ menu?
Kind of like how the ‘Add Mesh:Extra Objects’ AddOn handles ‘Single Vert’, ‘Math Function’, 'Mechanical, ‘Torus Objects’, and ‘Extras’.
It is an awesome AddOn you have shared, one that I imagine utilizing much as I transition from learning Blender to fully adopting it as my always go to 3D application. Thank you for making it that much more functional.
Awesome. It is nice to know that an ‘Advanced Cones’ ‘Add’ menu consolidation is an eventual possibility. Thank you for the sharing your work in progress plan. Every update, at any pace, is always welcomed with creative glee.
v1.4 is about 75% done now. Nearly feature-complete, just refactoring and optimization left. Probably will be posted by monday unless something goes wrong. Advanced cones are now under a submenu of Add -> Mesh. Added biconics (this will probably be the final new shape unless anyone else can think of any other interesting cones). Cones can now be added to existing objects in edit mode, and can be rotated at spawn.
This ended up being about a week late, the reason being a growth in scope of the update. I had already planned out the features for the next ~3 updates, but user requests plus my own needs plus complications of implementing certain bug fixes and API changes meant a lot of those changes had to be brought forward. Since a large chunk of the work planned for the next few updates was already going to be present, I decided to just make this a single large update rather than one medium sized one followed by a few small ones (each requiring a new readme), hence v2.0. Not all planned changes made it in, but most did
Anyway, heres the total changelog:
Added n-conic tool
Removed “Spherically capped cone” tool. Users should instead use the n-conic tool, with n=1 and Blunted enabled. Note that spherical blunting on n-conics is currently only supported for n=1
All Advanced Cones shapes are now found in a submenu, under Add -> Mesh -> Advanced Cones
Can add cones in edit mode
Checkbox to enable/disable spherical blunting on cone, tangent ogive
Spherical blunting is now based on repeated rotations rather than analytical definition. Gives even spacing along the curve instead of along the axis
Can set rotation of objects at spawn
Prolate hemispheroid spawns right-side-up
Added draw() method to each class, allows semi-dynamic control of what parameters are visible to the user
Moved faces array instantiation to geometry builder
Added protection for base radius of zero on tangent ogives (previously resulted in a division by zero)
Delta-qualification for backwards compatibility to at least Blender 2.69
Updated for API changes in latest Blender 2.80 beta release
Updated readme for above changes, screenshots now show Blender 2.80 interface
Known bugs:
When adding a cone to an existing object, the rotation attribute does not work in Blender 2.80. When adding a cone as a new object, the rotation works correctly
In Blender 2.69 (and possibly newer, probably older) the step size for attribute sliders is too high. Users should manually enter values instead. Sliders work properly in 2.79 and 2.80
TODO:
Spherically-blunted n-conics for n>1
N-conic lengths should be defined by length from the base, not by length from the apex (too confusing!)
Spherically-blunted secant ogives (and possibly other shapes?)
Tangent and secant ogives should both be defined as revolutions, not analytically
