The other tricky part with modifying Join is that it is one of the commands that just does its work and exits immediately without having any kind of "Adjust options" kind of stage to it.

I suppose it would be possible to change it so that if you did pick edge curves it could have another stage and let you change how it worked (choosing between doing MergeEdge or to produce a joined curve), but it just doesn't seem like that would be very natural.

> Do you mean the "Merge" operation would combine a separate edges or
> curves that share the end and also a surfaces which share an edge?

Yup, what I would imagine at first would be:

If you selected a single curve made up of multiple segments, it would fuse all the segments together into one single segment, automatically smoothing where the old segments used to meet.

If you selected several different curves that touched end to end, it would fuse them all into a new curve made up of a single smooth segment.

If you selected edge curves that touched end to end, it would do MergeEdge. Probably the edges need to be G1 for this to work.

If you selected 2 individual surfaces that touched along a common natural edge, it would fuse them into one single smooth surface.

I guess it would also make sense to merge co-planar surfaces within one solid together into a larger plane, but that actually already happens automatically now most of the time when you do booleans.

Any other ideas for what a Merge command should do?


The only other problem I'm worried about is that Merge sounds kind of similar to Join. I'm not so sure about putting it on the top level UI nearby Join, I might want to kind of stash it a little bit away in that "advanced edit tools" menu or something.

- Michael