Full Version: Top 5 Features list for V3 !

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Hi Pilou, so are those your top feature requests for v3, meaning that you'd be happiest if just those features were implemented and not anything else?

For this particular thread, it would be helpful to make sure you are talking about your top priority features that you'd like to see.

- Michael

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I don't think I officially posted my top five yet. Any order would be fine.

- Surface continuity of surrounding surfaces for as many existing surface tools in MoI.

- Strengthen Fillet including variable, put it on steroids or something.

- Basic dimensioning and annotation tools, pdf output will be fine.

- Deeper history.

- Deformation tools.

-A disco mirror ball.

P.S. I've already mentioned a tighter tolerance switch, but that doesn't count for this post :)

Cheers
~Danny~

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:)
my 5 five
Components replication system for big file as you know ;)
Point Curve against Control Point
Variable fillet
Zebra color checker over surface for see some wrong tension or tengency
Help messages when something wrong arrives :)

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same as DannyT here :)

Oh if you could get a T-Splines & Ledas partnership, Ill be complete :)

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I posted five before but then i just had a few months using MoI, now here are my new ones:

-Dimensioning and annotation
-Line types and widths and fillers
-pdf output for printing
(with that 3 above i could stop using autocad!)
-A better silhouette tool
-Deformers

In order of importance.

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My 5

-Dimensioning and annotation
-Line types and widths and fillers visible on monitor as well as when printed
-pdf output for printing
-extrusion of solids without having to use boolean union to have one solid after extrusion
-shade and shadow for 3d viewing (not very important - can be done with available rendering tools)
eric

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Hello,

My five requests are:

- Hidden line removal while keeping the most excellent AI export
- Filleting improvements
- Settable precision

Well, I thought I had five. I'm sure MG will come up with something that will make my tasks easier that I haven't even thought about. I'd be happy with the first one, that alone will lock in a v3 sale. Have a few larger projects coming up that will be using MoI for manual creation and the hidden line removal will save me loads of cleanup time.

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Would like to have a simple texteditor.
Network points after Boolean operation.
Manipulating networks with magnets, loopcuts, aereas or other possibilties.
History.


Rudl

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Hello Michael
Here is my Top 5 wishlist:

1: Deformation Tools
2: Deformation Tools
3: Deformation Tools
4: Deformation Tools
5: Import & convert obj to nurbs


Have a nice day,
Michael

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Hi Michael,

Heres my 5.... with a weeks experience (so may change ;))...

1. Text along a path
2. Falloffs (ala Modo)
3. Deformation tools
4. TBA
5. TBA

Thanks

Steve

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Hi Steve,

Excuse my ignorance but bu what are Falloffs or TBA?

Marc

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To Be Announced (I'll tell you later)

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Hi Marc,

Falloffs are modifiers use with move, rotate, etc. They affect to movement of an object. A linear falloff in modo set against a side of a rectangle for instance, allows you to move the side more at one end than the other.

Here is a link to the manual and falloff examples:

http://my.safaribooksonline.com/book/animation-and-3d/30000lti00192/working-with-the-tools/ch03lev1sec2

As said TBA (To be announced (as I have only owned Moi for a week only have only found these 3 features that I would find useful)).

:)

Steve

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Ah, I think I get it, some kind of proportional falloff or "soft selection".
It usually works on points or faces if I remember?

Marc

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Hi Steve, that could potentially work for curves, but for surfaces the structure of a NURBS model can be very different than how polygon mesh geometry is structured and that generally means that there isn't really a direct way to use the exact same tools that you would use with polygon meshes.

A NURBS model can be built out of "trimmed surfaces" - this is where there is an underlying surface that then has trim curves on it which mark different areas of the surface as inactive or holes. This means that there may not really be any correspondence between the surface control points that you would yank around and a particular edge - it's very different than in a polygon modeler since in a polygon modeler an edge or point that you see in the model can be pulled around and it pulls the surface too because surfaces in the poly modeler (polygon faces) are fundamentally defined as going through those points and through those edges.

Here's a bit more description of a "trimmed surface" - here I have a surface:




Now if I turn on control points for that surface, you can see that there is an underlying surface that is just 1 rectangular surface with 4 corner control points in it:



It's those 4 control points that actually define the overall shape of the surface, all the edges that you see are all trim curves that are defining which regions of the surface are inactive.

But the trim curves are just markers - they do not themselves define the shape of the surface, that comes only from the surface control points.

So that means that it does not really make sense for example to try and grab this edge curve here and try to move it around (like pull it up or down in Z for example):



The thing that can be freely pushed around is the 4 outer surface control points, not that marker trim curve that is just living on the surface.

So just in general this kind of structure with trim curves just does not work the same way as a polygon mesh structure as far as squishing individual points of things around.

There is some more description of how trim edges and "underlying surfaces" work here:
http://moi3d.com/faq#Q:_Why_does_show_points_work_for_some_objects_but_not_others.3F

So you may ask - why use this structure at all if it doesn't allow for doing the same things as a polygon mesh?

Well, the answer is that this very same structure is the reason why Boolean operations works so much better with NURBS than with polygons - in a NURBS model when you do a Boolean the surfaces of the models actually remain exactly the same and only new trim curves are calculated to mark different regions of them as being inactive. This fundamentally helps keep things a lot more under control because your model stays in large logical sheets - when doing a Boolean operation in a polygon modeler the poly modeling program has to fragment things into a zillion little tiny sub surface faces because it doesn't have this way to have just a zone on an existing piece to be marked as being a hole...

This difference in structure is basically why there is a much different base toolset in a NURBS modeler versus a polygon modeler. But that difference is kind of what makes NURBS useful as a companion to a poly modeler, because it has a much different set of both strengths and weaknesses...

- Michael

Image Attachments:
trimmed_srf1.jpg  trimmed_srf2.jpg  trimmed_srf3.jpg 

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Hi Michael,

Thanks very much for your detailed explaination.

I guess our only way to affect a mesh/nurbs object globally then is to use a deformer (bend, etc)? When I mentioned falloffs I was thinking of the control points on a sphere , where you have multiple points and applying a fall off to that would help produce certain shapes.

I do have question/feature request if its possible.... Would it be possible to increase the control points on an object (such as a plane) or a cube, etc. When creating a cube or a shere could we have an option to specify the number of control points it consists of? If an object has already been created could we increase the number of control points via a properties panel?

Thanks again

Steve

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Some noteworthy people have already mentioned these, but I'll reiterate since I think it's important.

1. Variable Fillet
2. Continuity options in more of the existing tools.

Those two alone would eliminate my need to use rhino every so often, and I think it would entice a lot of people to jump over to MoI.

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Hi Steve,

> I guess our only way to affect a mesh/nurbs object
> globally then is to use a deformer (bend, etc)?

Yeah, and that actually involves some fairly fancy stuff like automatically rebuilding surfaces to have as many control points in them to flex to the amount of bending that is happening. But there has been some support for that kind of thing in the new release of the geometry library that MoI uses, so there is a pretty good chance at being able to get something going for that kind of deformation. I'll know more about this kind of deformation when I get a chance to dig into it in v3.


> When I mentioned falloffs I was thinking of the
> control points on a sphere , where you have multiple
> points and applying a fall off to that would help produce
> certain shapes.

Yeah, it would actually work in this case - when you have a simple sphere that has not been booleaned with anything, then it is an "untrimmed surface" - one where the trim curves are only around the natural boundary of the surface.

Those can be handled by pulling control points around like you would with a polygon mesh. But the problem is that once you boolean it with something else then the resulting booleaned object is made up of various trimmed surfaces and you can't easily pull any of those control points around anymore without tearing open holes between the different trimmed pieces.

So because it's kind of limited to certain special cases, this area of surface control point manipulation is kind of underdeveloped in MoI right now, I wanted to focus more effort initially in areas where NURBS have their greatest advantages compared to poly modeling, like boolean operations.


> I do have question/feature request if its possible.... Would
> it be possible to increase the control points on an object
> (such as a plane) or a cube, etc.

Yes, this will be possible - I do expect to flush out some of the surface control point functions in MoI as time goes on and this would be part of that.

- Michael

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If we ever get falloff tools I would like them to be ala Michael Gibson or at list ala Alias ;) http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=3z5VyVuKqTA#at=50
http://wikihelp.autodesk.com/Alias/enu/2012/Help/0061-What's_N61/0071-Modeling71/0080-Direct_S80

Michael could something like that be possible with the Solid++ deformation engine?

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Hi adam,

> Michael could something like that be possible with
> the Solid++ deformation engine?

I'm not really sure yet since I have not had a chance to dig into it in detail yet.

But I think it's possible that a kind of deform that is limited to only a small localized area is not really a great fit with the deform mechanism.

It's probably going to be more likely for stuff that warps the whole object.

But we'll see...

- michael

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