> Does Moi will have a dedicated pipes maker?

Possibly sometime later, not for V1 though. But I'm not sure that it is really necessary because of the stuff already built into sweep.

To make a simple pipe in V1 you can use the auto-place mode that you were just asking about - just draw a circle a distance away from the curve, and when you do the sweep it will automatically place it perfectly perpendicular to the rail curve for you. That's really pretty simple.

The nice benefit of this over a dedicated pipe tool is that it is more general purpose - it allows you to use other shapes instead of just a circle, such as squares, stars, polygons, or arbitrary sketched curves. Just draw them flat on the plane in a rough left-to-right order for multiple profiles.

It is true that a dedicated pipe tool has less steps, but it is more restricted to only circular shape sections and unless you're modeling something like a plate of pasta, the difference in time is not very significant. MoI's auto-place mode already makes it pretty easy to create a simple pipe.

But I would like to make some UI to give a bit more control over triggering the auto place mode though.

It looks like Steph would be interested in the new scaling rail function that I added a couple of betas ago - that allows you to guide the shape of a pipe by using one exterior additional guide rail instead of drawing a whole bunch of different sections. For example, here is a simple pipe constructed using auto-place mode:



Then applying the scaling rail (click the "Pick scaling rail" button inside of sweep):



There are several benefits over using the scaling rail instead of drawing many cross-sections. First of all there are fewer curves to draw (just 3 curves drawn in this example!) so it can be created faster. You also get a lot more precise control over the exact shaping because you more directly control the entire profile of the entire surface instead of trying to control it by adding different radii only at particular points. The scaling rail also makes it a lot easier to manipulate the shape by history edits.

So if he needs to make a lot of lumpy pipes like that, tell him about auto-place mode plus a scaling rail, that should make it quite a bit easier.

- Michael