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!
Will to make a 3D and 2D dimensional grid of the Golden ratio for the different dimensions of metric and inch, and a custom sizes like the Russian fathoms? Such as in SketchUp or Vectorworks. For example as the Atrise GoldenSection or PhiMatrix Golden Ratio Design for a building structure.
Hi Vlad, it's a big goal to keep MoI simple and uncluttered, and so I'm sorry but it's not too likely to get these particular functions built in.
But you can use existing functionality to set them up now - for example if you set up a gridwork of line objects arranged in Golden ratio sections like you want, you can then use the Edit > Lock function to lock those lines so they will not be selectable but remain snappable and you can then use them for reference.
For Russian fathoms units, I'd recommend just leaving the unit system set to the generic "No unit system" and then just consider the units to be whatever you wish.
Hi Marco, I haven't had a chance to work on instancing for v4 yet, but it is high on the list of what I'd like to get done.
Probably the first v4 beta won't have any new features in it other than being 64-bit and a Mac native build, then once it looks like that big transition is stabilized I'll work on some new features on top of that. Dimensioning, instancing, and grouping are all high on the list of what I'd like to do but I cannot 100% promise exactly what will get in for v4 as of yet.
