Hi Alligator, if your "curves" and "surfaces" section of the scene browser are grayed out, it means you don't have any curve or non-solid surface objects currently in your model. All the things that look like curves that you are seeing are not "standalone curves" but instead are edges of solids.
You can convert edges into regular curves that are not connected to a solid by selecting the edges and using copy and then paste to duplicate them. Then you can hide the solid and you'll be left with a bunch of curve objects. You can also use Construct > Curve > Silhouette to generate silhouette curves for things like the outline border of a sphere where there is not necessarily an already existing edge.
But one thing to keep in mind is that you'll easily get a bunch of duplicated curves if you are duplicating edge curves on some shape that has both top and bottom faces on it. Like for instance if you have a cube if you duplicate all edges you'll have 2 sets of edges in the top view and if you export that to AI format they will get projected on top of each other and you'll have duplicates. So probably you'll want to delete the upper part of your model and only export the bottom faces if you have something like an extrusion with similar top and bottom faces in it.
In the future I want to make a mechanism for generating a "hidden edge" type display when exporting to a 2D format like AI, but currently it doesn't do that and just all edges or curves get exported so you need to yourself remove any edges (probably by just removing all the faces of the object other than the bottomost one) that you don't want to be part of the export.
> I'd like to do this because I have some edges with a fillet that I'd like to remove or undo.
That's a pretty different process - it is possible to remove edges but you need to first separate out the surfaces in that area so the edges you want to remove are not attached between 2 surfaces, then you can select the entire boundary and hit Delete to do an "untrim" and remove that boundary and recover the underlying surface there. See here for an example: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=444.4
And there's a longer tutorial on these kinds of object repair techniques here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=446.17
- Michael |
