Hi Michael
quote:
Hi Will, sorry I misunderstood... But really many parts of your message seemed to imply that you could not accomplish some particular thing in MoI.
Like for instance here:
quote:
I know that currently MoI's booleans behave better when working with closed surfaces / solids so attempting techniques like this now might not be that fruitful.
That certainly sounds to me like you think you cannot do anything to cut up open surfaces in MoI because the booleans are oriented towards working with solids.
But again, the workflow is that you use Trim to cut up such things rather than booleans. Trim accomplishes that result and will allow those techniques to work.
Many other parts of your message seemed to indicate that you thought such techniques would not work in MoI because you were forced to only work with solids in MoI but that is not the case.
When I said
behave better again that was because when I attempt to use booleans with open surfaces, they mostly would perform as trims - trying it now, I took two open surfaces, did a boolean add - the two surfaces are still separate and there's a little piece that I needed to delete that would have been removed if these were solids.
You've now explained to me that
trims are used for surfaces - at times I was still using booleans hence my impression about solids being preferred over surfaces within MoI.
There was also the issue with the surfaces normals for open surfaces that added even more reinforcement to my perceptions.
quote:
> I don't know if you've fixed this in the latest revisions of MoI
> so I've always tried to make everything solids while I work in MoI
> and delete faces in my poly apps.
It's not really something that is possible to be fixed - MoI needs to know about which surfaces have shared edges in order to make a consistent mesh with shared normals and shared vertex structures between each one.
That's not unique to MoI, it's the same in any NURBS modeling program that works with surfaces.
...And this is what I needed to know and why I asked - as far as my experience with NURBS, it has only been though Rhino up to v2 and now MoI.
Now I did perform a test yesterday, exporting two joined surfaces into Cinema 4D - all the normals were in the proper direction, but the app I really need to test is Lightwave since that's the one that exhibited the flips the last time I ran across the issue.
quote:
Where did you get this idea that a NURBS surface modeler is going to export consistently aligned normals
Never had the idea at all since my experience is now mostly with MoI - if that is a problem with other NURBS modelers, now I know.
quote:
and a watertight mesh without having the connections between the surfaces specified?
Here you've totally misunderstood my post.
I have a full understanding of NURBS surfaces and solids - that things need to be joined to be
water tight I would never expect to just butt two surfaces together and expect them to be implicitly joined while modeling or during export. I wasn't saying that in my post at all.
I'm sorry if you felt or it appeared that I was attacking MoI's capabilities, I was really just wondering if it was now okay to boolean and export open surfaces.
Looking back at my original post:
quote:
Even though he's making a watch, I can see myself using this technique for making my spaceship hulls way more interesting by making different shapes and joining them (bools and fillets) to the main hull. (I still mostly try to get my desired shapes from the earlier stages instead of adding components later...)
I also like how he creates his cutting planes, shapes and curves them first before he trims and cuts.
The way he's easily joining surfaces to me feels like he has somewhat more freedom then what is required of us now with MoI (solids).
I realize this his how NURBS modeling is typically done (especially seeing someone else do it is inspiring) but I still model in a clunky fashion coming from a polygon mindset - I haven't achieved NURBS nirvana like in this video yet...
What I was saying here was that it appeared
easier for him to join surfaces - making an assumption that he was using
bools (I didn't notice any separate trim/join - but that's not to say he didn't do that.)
By
freedom I meant it appeared that joining surfaces was a
single step operation as it is now for MoI with solids.
Finally my question to you was:
quote:
Michael, will MoI in the future work as easily with open surfaces as with solids - similar to say this video, or will we always need to use solids so things like the booleans and normal directions come out properly?
Which was asking would
booleans for open surfaces ever be as easy as with solids (from my impression in the video) and will the normal directions (be fixed) when exporting surfaces.
You've informed me that trims & joins are the methods within MoI for working with open surfaces and that
fixing the export normals for open surfaces is something that's not possible and that all open NURBS surfaces would exhibit flipped normals.
There's my answers...
-Will
