Cylinder Tools
Introduction
Within VueTools, there are three different Cylinder tools: Cylinder Radius, Cylinder Bevel and Cylinder Bullet.
The Cylinder Radius tool creates a smooth radius edge for the top and bottom of a cylinder primitive. The Cylinder Bevel tool creates a bevel edge for the top and bottom of a cylinder primitive. And the Cylinder Bullet tool creates a dome (half-sphere) on the top and bottom of the cylinder primitive.
Cylinder primitives can be any aspect size you wish. They can even be rotated. After applying any of the Cylinder tool operations, you are asked if you want to remove the original object. If you answer 'No' then it will be left in place and MUST BE MOVED in order to see the newly created cylinder group.
As with all Cube and Cylinder tools, you will not be able to automatically remove a the original object if it is determined to be an instance. This is a bug in Vue as it becomes unstable after removing an instance via Python. But, it is easy to manually remove it after the script has run.
Cylinder Radius
The Cylinder Radius tool creates a radius on the top and bottom of the cylinder based upon a user set scale factor. When you first run this script, it asks you to provide a scale factor between 0 and 1 with 1 being as large a radius as possible (converting the cube into a sphere) and 0 being no radius at all.
Once you set the radius, the script creates new cylinder and torus primitives to the correct places to create a new radiussed cylinder group, which is the same size as the original cylinder.
After the Cylinder is built, you are prompted "Open Ends of Cylinder?"
If you choose "Yes" then you will create an object much like the ones on the left in this image. If "No" then you will have a standard radiussed cylinder.
On the right of this image is an exploded view of the construction of the radiussed cylinder. After the Cylinder group is built, you are free to edit it however you like. Interesting possibilities occur when you choose to use other cube and cylinder tools on the parts of the Cylinder group.
Cylinder Bevel
Cylinder Bevel works the same as Cylinder Radius except it creates a bevel using boolean differences on the edges of the cube. While the finished shape of the Cube group is the same as the original cube, the bounding box of the whole group is larger because of the boolean subtraction objects.
As with Cyllinder Radius, you will be prompted to delete the original object after complete.
Cylinder Bullet
The Cylinder Bullet tool puts a sphere at each end of the cylinder while maintaining the original height of the cylinder. Because of this, cylinders must be more than twice as tall as they are wide, or else it will render as a sphere.