projecting splines

 From:  Michael Gibson
3530.11 In reply to 3530.8 
Hi rodney, so the Rebuild command that Burr is mentioning is a new command for MoI v2 but you have to set it up on a keyboard shortcut to run it, it doesn't have an icon set up for it currently in the regular UI.

Rebuild will reconstruct a curve kind of like drawing a new curve that has a bunch of its points snapped on to the existing one.

It is another way to help simplify a curve because it will try to form just one segment out of a curve that is made up of many smaller fragments (if they are close enough to being smooth to one another).

If you look at your intersection curve that you used for making the circular tube, if you run Edit > Separate on it, you'll see that it is made up of several individual segments that are joined together, they are separated by every spot where the intersection crossed the seam edge of the closed bottle surface.

So when you sweep along a multi-segmented curve, you will generate segmented surfaces as well, with one surface piece for each segment instead of just one long surface.

By doing a Rebuild on the rail for the tube, it makes it into a more simple curve made up of just one long smooth segment so that helps to make just one surface when you sweep it, and that makes for fewer edges and pieces in the thing you want to fillet.


In the future I'll probably try to do something like an automatic Rebuild on the output from surface/surface intersection (and possibly projection too), once I am really convinced that there won't be any cases where the Rebuild would make things worse...

- Michael

EDITED: 12 May 2010 by MICHAEL GIBSON