Hi blindfoldjump, the thing is those tools in Modo are related to manipulating 3D point cages for organic sculpting. CAD solids cannot be manipulated in the same way as edge loops in polygon modeling, so there's kind of a mismatch between Modo and MoI in that sense.
I do want to add some more ways to select a chain of edges in the future too, but since the overall CAD workflow does not share the same major focus on manipulating edge loops like sub-d modeling has it might not be something that gets elevated to double click though.
Hi blindfoldjump, also another reason why I like to have people explain their requests instead of just pick something from a poll, is that often it is already possible to do something that they request like grow/shrink face selection in this particular case.
Hey Michael
Thank you for taking the time to answer and being patient - sorry about me not educating myself on the topic properly before suggesting things. In the back of my head I kinda suspected you already been through this.
"Hi blindfoldjump, also another reason why I like to have people explain their requests instead of just pick something from a poll, is that often it is already possible to do something that they request like grow/shrink face selection in this particular case."
re:
> sorry about me not educating myself on the topic properly before suggesting things.
No worries at all - right now with there being no central script repository it's just normal that you wouldn't necessarily be able to find one particular thing like that and you'd have to ask to discover it. In the future when I'm able to make a script repository that's browsable from within MoI that will help with discovering such things.
Hi Dzeko, re: #1 unfolding, unfortunately unrolling surfaces is a quite complex area of work because it's not mathematically possible to unroll just any curved surface to a flat sheet without stretching things, that's only physically possible with a special category of curved surfaces called "developable surfaces".
Surfaces in MoI are not restricted to only be constructed as developable surfaces, so it would be kind of weird to have an unfold surface tool which didn't work on most things that you constructed in MoI, there would probably need to be a whole set of special developable surface construction and analysis tools in order for that to really make sense, but that makes this a quite complex intertwined set of specialized features which is unlikely to happen in MoI anytime soon.
Rhino does have some of those tools though, if you need surface unrolling now you can use Rhino in combination with MoI to do it.
> i talk more about a very simple flatten surface.
What is the end goal of your simple flattening - something like making paper cutouts? Rolling sheet metal to make metal panels? Or something different?
Hi Dzeko, so in your post you wrote "( Unfold curved surface capabalities )" where I took special notice that you used the word "curved".
But your example (deleted now?) has only all flat surfaces and not any curved ones...
Are you looking for something that would unfold only objects made up of all planar surfaces? Something like that could probably be done as a plug-in at some point in time, maybe not quite yet but maybe when a few more things are added to the script interface layer it could be possible.
Would it be possible to export a curve as a motion path via FXB (or elsewise)?
If so, might it be reasonable to do so from a script even while we await V4?
Of course, I do not know what would be involved in such a request... but it would be an EXTREMELY useful capability.
Again, thank you for all the good work that you do.
I am a real fan.
Hi Mindset, I'll see what can be done in v4, you might mention it again once v4 betas are underway.
I don't think it will be feasible to do from a script, scripting does not currently have access to all the low level details of the curve structure.
In the meantime, Moi can currently export curves to 3DM, SAT, STEP, IGES, and DXF formats so see if your target software supports reading any of those. You can also export curves to SKP format as well although they'll get turned into polylines.
Seems that my request for multi-segment marquee selection tool was answered by http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=8088.5
Have not really tried it yet... but...
WOW! Thank you Michael Gibson!!!
Best software community ever! Moi3d!
