A few months ago I was planning on that but unfortunately the circumstances have changed and that's no longer the case.

Plasticity is doing them by using a geometry library called C3D. I had also wanted to use C3D to do the same things inside of MoI but it's become unfeasible to do that because C3D is the product of a Russian company and the Russia/Ukraine war has made it untenable to license it for use in MoI.

I might attempt to do my own implementation of direct face editing (the rotate face part) at some point here but I don't know when. There is a lot of work involved and so it's not very likely for the next version.

What is the situation with face rotation that is causing trouble in Plasticity, do you have an example of that?

Hi RD, yes I've looked into using Parasolid before but it's not a great fit for MoI.

First because it's quite expensive and licensing it puts various restrictions on how you can price and deliver the product using it. In general it's very corporate/"Big Enterprise" oriented.

But also I found it to be kind of finicky in the type of geometry it accepts, especially with closed surfaces. It represents trimming boundaries on closed surfaces in a somewhat different way than MoI's current geometry library does and that makes for some problems in transferring model data between them.

It's a lot of work to switch everything in MoI over to a different library, the main way that I would want to use a new library would be to use it initially in just a couple of key spots like filleting, shelling, and face transforms and translate model data back and forth between the kernels. When the trim boundary mechanisms don't match up too well that becomes difficult to do with 100% reliability.

One of the things that was particularly good with C3D is that it represented trim boundaries similar to how MoI currently does where a trim boundary 3D edge curve maps directly to a surface uv parameter space curve and does not cross over the seam of a closed surface like Parasolid's method.

Maybe at some point I will re-evaluate it but not anytime soon. Certainly not for the next version. It's more likely that I would do some experimental work on face transforms myself first before doing that.

I'm fairly lucky that I didn't end up investing a whole lot of time with C3D, I had just started an in depth evaluation of it a couple of weeks before the war started.

- Michael