Imagine you need to make something like the studs on a lego plate, but the plate can have any dimensions.
This means that sometimes, some of the studs might get "cut in half".
And that means it's impossible to model the studs with a parameter, because no operations that follow the pattern will be able to cut them in half, because the studs themselves did not exist at the point in time when the cut operation happened (they only spring into existence when the parameter is later increased).
Or - another way to ask the same question - is there a way to do a rectangular or circular pattern, that performs a "join" or a "cut" rather than a "new body" ?
Or - yet another way to ask the same question - is it possible to combine "all bodies" into something, without specifically selecting the individual bodies (you see where I'm going here? The pattern makes any number of bodies, so, I'm trying to sleuth a way to perform a cut or join on all of those).
Or - well - I don't know what I don't know! How else might I accomplish the goal of inserting an arbitrary number of shapes into my design, in a way that doesn't "break" the ability for my design to subsequently perform operations on them all ? What about components - can operations from one component cut or join "everything" that's in some other component? Can we mess with history tricks to accomplish something? Any ideas?
