Hi Mike,

> There must be some way to at least introduce a simple command,
> even an addition to the Align tool set.
> One that would apply tangential alignment to the edges and
> intersections of selected associated mesh networks.

In v3 I do want to work on a tool for aligning a surface to be smooth to a neighboring one.

But when you're building a bunch of surfaces in a NURBS modeler like MoI, it's rare for the control point structures of each surface to be the same, so the alignment process can't just move control points of each surface in line with each other, it is more of a process of treating the target surface as an analytic smooth object and adapting the surface to be modified to the other surface's shape, nothing really to do with its control points.

If you have 2 surfaces that touch each other and have the same control point structure where they touch, that's probably an indication that you should have built those surfaces as one big single surface right from the beginning rather than as small individual surface pieces.

One common problem with people that I tend to see with people coming from a polygon modeling background is that kind of construction method of building an object out of a lot of little separate patches sitting side by side - usually instead with NURBS modeling you want to build a much larger single surface for something that is supposed to be smooth and then form the final edges by cutting away portions of that large extended piece, rather than an approach of building all the surfaces directly along their final edges.


Here are some links to some discussions on this kind of fundamental NURBS technique of creating extended pieces and then cutting them to produce the final model, browsing these links may help:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3855.7
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3855.9


> These show up and gives a solid that unwanted "panel-ized"
> appearance. It's been the only disconcerting thing to me I've run
> into learning how to use MoI.

Do you have an example of that kind of unwanted panelization?

It may be the result of using that kind of patch-by-patch building approach instead of the "Build one large extended surface that then gets trimmed" approach - it often takes polygon modelers some time to get accustomed to thinking about using trimming and cutting as a first class modeling method since it is something you avoid with polygon modeling but it's the main method to do things with NURBS modeling.

Once you get the hang of building more extended simple pieces and then cutting them to get your final boundaries rather than trying to surface the final boundaries directly, you can get better results and things actually go more quickly as well.

- Michael