Example 36
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I think that a good
example is to make the Big Ben tower clock with a dynamic
clock.
This example is made using two different macros - NovaEx36a: This macro is the entire tower building macro and is made using a scale of 1/2. NovaEx36b: This macro is only the dynamic clock section and is made at a scale of 1/16. On the right you can see the Big Ben tower is made exclusively with cubes. Click here to learn more about the cube and all its functionalities. This example will only show you the design of the dynamic clock parts. In case you are wondering I am quite aware that the real Big Ben clock does not have a seconds hand however with Nova we can do almost anything.
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There is not too much to do on this tool other than design the shape of each of the hands. Here is the hours hand.
A very important issue is the rotation center of the hands, as shown in the example.
There is no hand transparency - they are always 100% full opaque.
The altitude is the distance from the ground to the hand center (0,0) point coordinates. From the example the distance is 1052 meters, or 1052/16 = 65.75 meters from the ground.
Main panel view of the clock. The clock hands are placed at 81 meters from the center of the tower, the calculation is made as follows: Width of the tower = 10 meters, so 5x16 = 80 + 1 meter from the wall = 81. As you can see the hands are placed at 1/16 meters from the wall tower.
All that's left to do is copy the first clock to the required position so it shows on the 4 sides. If you now save your macro you will get a compilation error since the generated code is too big and greater than 32K.
You are using the same clock at 4 different positions so you should maximize your macro which, at the same time, will decrease the size of it considerably.This panel shows all clocks using sequence 01 and rotated in 90 degrees increments to fit on all 4 sides.