"dynamic extrude"

 From:  Michael Gibson
3966.5 In reply to 3966.1 
Hi Burr, that's definitely cool but there are a lot of issues with that to consider.

You mention:

> If it was possible to combine a couple things like curve
> drawing and revolve and extrude, that could create this
> "realtime" effect

So right off the bat one big issue is which curve drawing command are you talking about, there are actually 24 different curve drawing commands in MoI, including:

Line, Polyline, Freeform curve by control points, Freeform curve by through points, Sketch, Rect by corner points, Rect by center points, Rect by 3 points, Polygon center, polygon by edge, polygon star, circle by center point, circle by 2 diameter points, circle through 3 points, circle tangent, arc by center point, arc continue, arc by 3 points, arc tangent, ellipse by center point, ellipse by diameter points, ellipse by corner points, helix, and conic...

Are you talking about making a special mode for just one of those 24 commands, or are you talking about something that would add more options to each of those 24 commands?

What about if you wanted to build a curve made up of some multiple segments using different drawing methods for each particular segment?

That's just a lot of potential complexity - the way that MoI is set up where you create some curves and then handle creating a surface once your curve creation is done avoids a lot of these issues and tends to help keep things more simple. It makes it easier for me to have a wide variety of curve editing tools like 24 different drawing tools, edit tools like trims and booleans and fillets that also work on curves, etc... The more kinds of additional functions each one of these commands that deals with curves has to try to accomplish built into it makes it more difficult to develop each one.

Doing a revolve by drawing a curve first and then making the revolve separately is also just more general purpose - what if you want to generate the profile curve by importing it from a different file, or by generating it by intersecting some surfaces together or something like that? By doing a revolve as a separate Revolve command as MoI is currently set up for, it gives that kind of total flexibility on letting you use any method that you want to get the input curves set up, instead of just one particular drawing tool... That's why some special "draw curve with revolve built in" function can't really work as the only way to make revolves, it would have to be something extra in addition to the regular revolve and extra stuff like that sort of needs to provide some fairly important functionality in exchange for the complexity and bloat that comes with the additional UI needed to control it.

- Michael