loading two geoms

[Dennis Roseman <roseman at dimension4.math.uiowa.edu>]

I am trying to build  a geom by putting things together called  
slices. 

 

Each of these is a collection of geoms which I loaded, arranged and  
saved using the "save as commands" option of geomview.  (All done  
with normalization off).  I do not want to "save as geometry" since I  
may want to move these parts around later.

I have gotten two files--slice1.off and slice2.off which I have put  
in /u/roseman at the Center.

slice1.off  consists of a "slice-thing1"  and three little  
dodecahedra within the bbox of the  "slice-thing1".

slice2.off  consists of a "slice-thing2"  and three little  
dodecahedra within the bbox of the  "slice-thing2".

To get slice2.off, I took slice1.off, deleted "slice-thing1", loaded  
"slice-thing2" and then moved the three little dodecahedra into the  
new bbox. Then I saved it.

The two bounding boxes meet in (only) a common face.

Each of these, separately, looks just fine; I just want to see both  
at once.

That is, I want to put all this together and get the two slice-things  
(they fit together seamlessly) and six little dodecahedra.  (The  
result I am after can be seen by loading slice1.off and then  
slice2new.off)

I thought I could get what I want by first loading slice1.off in  
geomview, then loading slice2.off. 

 

I get the slices fitting together all right, but the little  
dodecahedra are not.   Two seem to have disappeared, a third is  
misplaced.

(I've tried this on Iris and Next)  


 1) I don't understand exactly why I get the result I see when I load  
both of these files--but the reason it doesn't work has to do with  
the way I constructed the files. 


 The problem is the fact that the dodecahedra in the separate files  
share names.  In fact, if I go in and "hand edit the ddd names" I can  
get slice2new.off (also in /u/roseman and this works).  


"diff slice2.off slice2new.off" will show the changes I have done.  

  

2)  I don't see how to do what I want to do in geomview.  (Actually,  
the thing that I'm after will be obtained by putting together 25-30  
of these slices, by adding slice after slice, with the slices  
becoming more complex.  And assuming this works out I will  then will  
want to go and do some more.examples of this kind ). To get the final  
result that calls for a lot of ugly hand editing of a lot of geom  
files--hardly interactive graphics.