Hi All,
I hope everyone is having a relaxing Saturday so far. Let me start by welcoming the new members that joined us this month - welcome aboard!
I’m back at the desk after a nice trip home to Ireland over Easter…first in about a year, thanks to you know what! So, it’s time to get working on the next course!
After some deliberations and considering your inputs, I’ve decided to push ahead with the 3D expansion to the cable analysis course that just launched. I’ve just started to expand the code so it’s early days but I thought I would share progress so far. The video attached to this post just shows a brief turntable animation of a hypar (hyperbolic paraboloid or saddle) cablenet roof structure. This is my case-study structure for development.
I’ve amended the Python visualisation to accommodate a 3D structure - which actually took quite a bit of work, see below. You’ll notice that I (after a lot of Googling) I’ve solved the problem of inconsistent axis scaling for 3D plots (when I say I’ve solved…what I really mean is I’ve found how someone else solved it!). It’s not perfect but it’s a lot better than what we achieved in the 3D spaceframe course.
Since we’re extending an existing code base and solution architecture, I’m cautiously optimistic that I’ll get this structure converging without too much trauma…I’ll keep you posted. Only a very rough timeline for release at this stage (I may be moving house in the middle of production 
but I’ll try not to let that get in the way), I’m hoping for end of May/start of June for release. It somewhat depends on how some of the ideas I have for the course pan out. There is so much potential for interesting geometry generation workflows in Blender and I’d love to get some of this into the course…we’ll see.
Ok, that’s all for now. Have a good weekend, I’ll check-in in another week or two.
Seán