Some really cool work, Alex!

- Michael

Special Thanks to you Michael for creating this software which is a joy to use.
Have been working on this project will post more details as they progress international high profile sculpture location withheld at the moment. The pose outer shell was done in Blender but all the presentation based hard surface modelling and PDFs 100% done in MOI. Final renders a mix of blender and rhino. Was going to produce all the fabrication files through Solidworks but with new workflow can keep the DNA of this project entirely from MOI.
All the best for 2024 and keep doing what your doing so well.
Alex.

Fabulous!
with the free Vizcom https://app.vizcom.ai
maybe transparency is not exactly the same! :)

Wow, that's really cool, can't wait to see more construction!

Thanks, - Michael

Alex, very impressive work, well done and congratulations on the progress thus far! I had no idea there was such a thing as a 4-axis CNC tube bender...I'm just happy working with manual benders and blacksmithing techniques. Someday it would be really neat to see a video of the construction and installation of this sculpture, but I can only imagine that you've got your hands full with the work itself.

--Larry

Very cool, Alex!

Thanks all for input and comments and Pilou the Vizcom image regen is pretty impressive from the black and white render AI certainly moving along. The above workflow works well for a reconstructing a 2d spline into a series of tangency arcs trying to do the same workflow for a 3d curve - does anyone know if its possible for the cont/arc tool to follow a 3d guide curve as in this image I can get it follow only in 1 viewport. any advice once again welcome.

Hi Alex,

re:
> does anyone know if its possible for the cont/arc tool to follow a 3d guide curve as in this image
> I can get it follow only in 1 viewport. any advice once again welcome.

In MoI when you pick points in one of the ortho (Top/Front/Right) views, the points will generally be projected onto the view's grid plane going through the previous picked point.

This is so that when you are drawing in a 2D view you can know that points you get are on that plane.

This restriction is not applied when you pick points in the 3D view, that's why you're seeing a difference when using that view. So if you want to have several points in a draw tool follow a 3D path then pick them in the 3D view.

- Michael

Hi Alex,

I just tried doing it with Arc > Cont. That works, but you'll need to make small steps and work in the 3D viewport only. While picking the 2nd point of each arc move the 3D view around to get an overall sense of how closely it's following the freeform curve. From some angles it might look like a perfect fit, but from other viewpoints you'll see that there's actually a big gap.

Doing this with the built-in Rotate view control will be very painful because you need to rotate the view back and forth while picking the 2nd point of each arc. I'm using a SpaceMouse and that works pretty well for this.

One thing I noticed is that the resulting polyarc tends to kind of oscillate around the freeform curve. If you need it to look really smooth you might have to change the freeform curve so that it is more like a few long arcs and straight lines. Or you'll need to make really small steps which the people doing the bending probably won't like. Or you might need to find a fabricator with a CNC bender designed for doing freeform curves rather than just radii and angles.

- Peer

Thanks again for advice all working nicely