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Grateful Dead Tracks Anywhere?

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(@bychance)
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Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 17
Topic starter  

Has anyone come across any Grateful Dead tracks?

Admin: You may be missing a huge customer base!


   
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(@bychance)
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Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 17
Topic starter  

I guess there aren't to many Dead Heads in the forum.

Here is my stab at this.

Is there a known way to take AutoCad drawings (.dwg or .dxf) files and convert them to .thr files?

I think this would look better using a table with minimal sand.

This post was modified 4 years ago by ByChance

   
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(@bychance)
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Thumbnail image


   
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(@bruce)
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Joined: 6 years ago
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This is superb!

And yes - there is a direct way to go from pline to thr file (I am a long (long) time user of ACAD :).

Thank you for sharing.

Bruce

sadly, the AutoLISP file I attached is not (yet) allowed - coming soon...


   
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(@bychance)
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Joined: 4 years ago
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Topic starter  

Can you email it to me or use a dropbox?

 

I am dying to create!

Thank you,


   
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(@bychance)
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Joined: 4 years ago
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Topic starter  

Can you give me the name of the lisp or any information on it?

There is a good chance I would be able to find it. Lisp routines are shared openly across the web.


   
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(@bruce)
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Sorry for the delay - instead of waiting for my web-devs to add *.lsp to the list of attachments, I just changed the extension (change back to .lsp after downloading). Since I wrote these routines back in ~2000 using much older ACAD versions, and I was very into debugging the conversion, there are two routines involved and some couple caveats:

1- This is a two step process: First, create a circle with center at 0,0 and radius of 1 (this is the just to remind you of the boundary of your drawing canvas). Within the circle, put/draw your artwork consisting of a single polyline composed only of straight segments (no arcs). I think line width is ignored, but set it to 0 if it complains (doesn't work). Make sure the polyline is the old style "lightweight". On newer versions, this is not the default polyline type. To change to this type, enter "plinetype" at the command line, and enter "0".  Load polarxy2c.lsp. Execute it by typing "makepolar" at the command line. It will prompt you to choose a pline. Do so and <enter>. You then should see a deformed version of the original. The routine has changed the XY positions of each vertex of the original to polar coordinates (numerically), and plotted them as new positions (as if they were still XY coords, hence the distortion). If that worked, you are ready for the next step (next post).

 

 


   
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(@bruce)
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Joined: 6 years ago
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Step 2:

Load PL2thr1.lsp (attached extension mod below). Run by entering "pl2thr" at the cmd line. Choose your now distorted polyline and hit <enter>. It will prompt your for a file name and location, and create the thr file there.

Some caveats:

  • Yes this could be a single step by combining the routines, but I was too lazy then, and I don't use it very often now (plus, I think the intermediate distortion looks interesting at times).
  • Just vanilla plines (type 0). No arcs, splines, etc.
  • Start and end your tracks either at the center or the edge of the circle. Check the resulting thr file. The rho value of the first and last vertex in the file should be either 0 or 1 (start and end can be the same rho). Rho = 1 is anywhere on your boundary circle.
  • Remember, in the polar world, the path between 2 points is a spiral (Archimedes). Erase.thr is a 100-rev spiral having only two vertices - starting at 0 0, and ending at 200*Pi 1. If you want a straight line in your artwork to appear straight on the sand, it must contain points along its span - these "tack it down" during the conversion. The number of these tack-down vertices you need to add is up to you - more looks better, but makes the file longer (and at a certain point just slows things down and doesn't produce better output on the sand).

Let me know how it goes :).


   
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(@bychance)
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Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 17
Topic starter  

AWESOME!

Thank you for taking the time to type all that up.

I'm looking forward to hammering more patterns out!

I'm sure I'll be back with questions after I put some time in.

Again, Thank You very much! 


   
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(@bychance)
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Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 17
Topic starter  

When making the PLine, is it ok to back track along the same PLine?

example: drawing a capital T you would have to start at the upper left of the top of the T then go across to the far right, then back half way then down for the vertical section.

 


   
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(@bruce)
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Joined: 6 years ago
Posts: 529
 

Yes. That does make it a lot harder to edit the vertices though. I often make the back-tracking slightly offset so I can easily grab its vertices if I want to edit them.


   
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(@cooperlublin)
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Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 8
 

fellow dead head here! just got my new table and this is exactly what i am looking for. have you made any more recently?


   
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(@gliebig)
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Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 21
 

I'd LOVE a nice Steal Your Face track.

Just setup my sisyphus last night and had GD playing for several hours while watching my table.


   
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(@cooperlublin)
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Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 8
 

it just so happens thats i made one a few days ago! check out the most recent tracks in the community to find it. there are two different versions. i think both look pretty cool and couldn’t decide which one to upload so i uploaded both. hope you enjoy! it was my first attempts at making a track


   
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(@gliebig)
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Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 21
 

Love it!  Thank you for making it. 🥂 


   
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(@bychance)
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Joined: 4 years ago
Posts: 17
Topic starter  

cooperlublin, 

Sorry, I've been away from the forum for sometime. I've only made the one tract and it was a painful process. I hope to get back into attempting them in the future. I am looking forward to downloading your SYF tract!

I posted a few pics of my table in a GD facebook group with minimal interest. I was shocked and saddened.  

Happy to see 2 more Deadheads!


   
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