Michael,
> I guess I'm not sure how it's any different than setting a CPlane in MoI ?
> Is it because there's some animation that happens during the view movement or something else?
Though SW animates this, it's just decoration that we could do without but what I like about this functionality is that we just need to select a surface or a 3D curve and by clicking this icon, the view switches automatically normal to this surface or curve. I just think it could speedup the workflow.
quote: I'm not sure about that - the constraint at 19:40 seems to me to be about just making that one particular curve have a horizontal tangent, I don't believe it has anything to do with the entire surface at that particular point yet. It looks like the shape of the entire edge is modified around 21:25 when an additional relation is added to the entire edge - so as far as I can tell the curve constraint that you are referring to at 19:40 does not apply to the entire length of the generated surface just from that alone which is what you seem to be saying?
Your right and again I missed a few things. The main idea though is still about constraint and or relation and especially, in case of curve, we can specify these constraint at each end independently and in the case of surface, we can specify these constraint edge by edge. Now implementing something like that a la Moi may be quite difficult if not impossible without a major shift in what makes MOI a moment of inspiration. I just like this concept of constraint and I'd like to have this in Moi if ever possible.
quote: At any rate, I do expect to get in a couple of new key tools that would help for doing this kind of stuff - one is an "N-sided blend", which would function fairly differently than the current blend - the current blend works basically similar to sweep where there are 2 rails and the sweep profiles are constructed by blend curves being created between the surfaces. An "N-sided" blend (which is called Fill in that video) will take a closed loop of edges and then fits a larger square surface patch that goes through those and then gets trimmed by those edges. It will actually work more by taking an initial plane surface and deforming that plane until it warps through those boundary edges, so it's fairly different in its construction method than the 2-sided sweep-like current Blend command. The tricky part is to make the plane deform in a nice way and not have things like undulations and ripples in areas where there are not any fit points.
It's not the first time you mention this new "N-sided Blend" command. I'm sure it will be impressive and very useful. When you mention: "the tricky part is to make the plane deform..." it sound like you intend to use some form of iterative process to implement this. Does this mean the library use for this kind of stuff (Solid++ I think) doesn't have a function for this already? Just curious.
Felix |
