Hi Felix,

> I understand we can create a cplane just as easy in Moi. I mentioned this feature
> of SW because it seems to work a bit like "magic" and I find this pretty nice feature.

I guess I'm not sure how it's any different than setting a CPlane in MoI ? Is it because there's some animation that happens during the view movement or something else?


> re re Fill- If I understand correctly, in SW when you set a constraint or a relation
> like is establish near 19:40 on the profile curve, we are insured it will be maintained
> all the way along the rail curve (or edge of the surface).

I'm not sure about that - the constraint at 19:40 seems to me to be about just making that one particular curve have a horizontal tangent, I don't believe it has anything to do with the entire surface at that particular point yet. It looks like the shape of the entire edge is modified around 21:25 when an additional relation is added to the entire edge - so as far as I can tell the curve constraint that you are referring to at 19:40 does not apply to the entire length of the generated surface just from that alone which is what you seem to be saying?

Right in that same area of the video it looks like there is an entire page along the left side hand of the application to control a zillion options for stuff - that's really exactly the kind of complex UI that I'm trying very hard to avoid having inside of MoI.


> re re: various constraints You mention at some point you wanted to add something
> like a property page and you mentioned as well, if I recall correctly, that you thought
> of using a dialog box in that specific case.

Yeah but such things are not what I'd exactly call "desirable" - I am planning on putting in a kind of dumping ground area where I will be able to put in a whole bunch of specific object tools in an object property page but that does not necessarily mean that I want that to be the new standard approach for doing a bunch of other things in that same way too!

Something that would require huge complex dialog boxes in order to function will tend to go on the back burner for quite a while as I hope to find other alternatives to do it better than that. That's basically one essential strategy that helps to avoid the UI from getting super complex and difficult to use.


At any rate, I do expect to get in a couple of new key tools that would help for doing this kind of stuff - one is an "N-sided blend", which would function fairly differently than the current blend - the current blend works basically similar to sweep where there are 2 rails and the sweep profiles are constructed by blend curves being created between the surfaces. An "N-sided" blend (which is called Fill in that video) will take a closed loop of edges and then fits a larger square surface patch that goes through those and then gets trimmed by those edges. It will actually work more by taking an initial plane surface and deforming that plane until it warps through those boundary edges, so it's fairly different in its construction method than the 2-sided sweep-like current Blend command. The tricky part is to make the plane deform in a nice way and not have things like undulations and ripples in areas where there are not any fit points.

Then the other main new tool needed in this general area is a "Match" tool which is about editing an edge of an untrimmed surface so that the surface is smooth with a neighboring one.

- Michael