Michael,
Thanks and I cant wait to dig in.

Regarding how commands work, I'm using the custom revolve from petr's page written as "revolve" which overwrites the default command. May I loose new functionality from revolve If I dont switch the command name to keep the new default?

In other words, I may have to create a revolve2 with a shortcut so I dont break a new change you made to the revolve in the sept. beta.

Make sense?
Burr

Hi Burr - yes if you overwrite a standard command with a different one, you will lose whatever changes were in the standard one.

But I don't remember any changes to revolve in particular for this new beta though...

- Michael

Roger Wilco.

Hello Michael.
Here's an oddity, but may be just my process.

Create some surface text.



Select Naked Edges with new script. Extrude.



Delete Naked edges.



FYI or my learning.

Burr

Hi Burr - believe it or not that is all working as intended... :)

When you do the "delete naked edges" step, that performs what is called an "untrim" operation, which will remove the trimming curves and recover the underlying surface.

Basically, surfaces in MoI are structured with a possibly larger underlying sheet which can then have trim curve information on top of it that marks which areas of the surface are cut away. There is some more description and illustration of this on this FAQ page entry.

When you delete those edges you are then exposing that underlying surface. When planar curves are turned into a trimmed surface, the plane tends to have a bit larger margin around the curves, and that is the plane that you are seeing there. You can also see the control points for the plane by picking those text surfaces and using Edit/Show pts, that may help to explain where those planes come from. I mean when you see the points you will be able to see that there are some planes there that are part of the definition of those trimmed surfaces.


Normally in a situation where you have created faces there you would select the whole faces to extrude rather than their edges. With the new beta that will automatically consume the face for you so you won't have any delete step.

Or if you did want to have a delete step then you would want to create the text as curve objects instead of as planar faces.

Or if you did want to extrude edges then you would not try to delete the edges, since they are not independent objects to be removed, they are a sub-object portion of another larger structure.

It's your step of deleting the edge curves sub-objects of the faces that produces the untrim effect.


Then the cube at the right appears due to the history updating mechanism - because that I letter shape has the same number of edge curves in it after it is untrimmed as before, the extrude history is able to find a match for the original edges used to build the extrusion, and then re-applies the extrusion which then makes that box. If you don't want that to happen you can select the extruded "I" and pick Edit / History / Disable update. That will turn off history updating for the extruded shape so it will no longer attempt to re-extrude it when the original input is edited.

By default history updating is enabled for the results of extrude so you can do things like extrude a curve, then turn on control points for the curve to edit it and have the extrusion update along with the edits to the curve.


Does that make sense?

- Michael

Trivial question but want to be sure :)
Is that normal?

Thanks Michael.
I did see the larger point structure and did A "shrink trimmed surface" to consolodate the points when I was fooling around with the naked edges script. Didnt put 2 + 2 together though, and now I understand.

It's a process, not an event!

Thanks,
Burr

Hi Pilou, I did a quick test and it seemed to work ok over here:





It must have something to do with your shape specifically, pehaps with how the pole of the sphere is situated.

Can you please post your model file so I can take a look at your particular example?

It is probably a bug in fillet but it could help if I could see your model to take a look.

- Michael

Hi Burr, I can certainly see how it was a kind of "what the heck?" type thing... :) But yes at the same time actually a good example of several of the mechanisms in MoI.

Probably the weirdest part was the cube kind of popping up.

History updates can sometimes make for surprising changes when you edit the original shapes. That's why they are not turned on universally for all operations, especially some more basic building block type commands like rotate and copy can lead to these kind of surprises when objects change when you edit the originals if you were not really thinking of the link between them.

But when it is not turned on then there can be a problem where it is not really that obvious to someone how to activate the link for doing things like adjusting a revolve by editing the original curve's control points.

So that's why in MoI history is enabled by default for just a certain set of commands, mostly surfacing commands like extrude and revolve.

- Michael

Damned I had not keept the 3Dm ...but...refound a new example!
Jut a Solid Cube
a sphere at the corner
Boolean Diff
Fillet 0.2

Exactly same result than mine above!
don't works for the selections shown???
Beta 2.0 21 September 2008
I don't take care of the sphere's pole!)

Edit: Seems that is something like that!
I rotate the sphere and that works!
The problem is that the default drawing of the sphere is on the false position ;)

Hi Pilou, yes that is a bug in the filleter where it is getting confused about how to trace the fillet rails in that situation when the sphere's pole is in that particular alignment.

I was able to fix this up for the next beta release though, so that your posted example will work properly in the next update.

I've also made some adjustments so that the filleter will try not to fail entirely if there was a problem with one particular area.

Thanks for posting the example file!

- Michael

cool because for a beginner it's pertubating to see something like that!

Hi Michael,

After installing the new september version i had this type of error window, unable to reach a fonction shortkey like Pipe or distance, autorotate. Others shortkeys are ok !. . Do you know from where come this problem ? I have desinstalled all other version of MOI ... i have this problem with other versions installed too.

When i hit the P tab for exemple for pipe, a window appear with " Erreur d'execution Microsoft jscript": 'pipe' is indefini ".line 0 column 0.

Thanks.

Pierre.

Does it mean i have to reinstall all scripts ?

Bonjour Pierre, yes that means you have a keyboard shortcut that is calling a custom command that is not installed.

Currently when you install a custom command such as Pipe, Autorotate, etc... - those get copied into the \commands subfolder underneath MoI's main installation folder.

When you install a new beta release, it goes into its own new installation folder, and its new \commands subfolder does not have that custom command in it.

So you will need to copy those command files (usually there are 2 of them, one .htm and one .js file) into the \commands folder in the new installation to make them work.

Shortcut keys are defined in the moi.ini file which is located in a separate centralized place (under c:\Documents and Settings) than the main installation, so those definitions and settings will automatically persist between installations.

- Michael

Maybe I miss that somewhere...
Is it possible to see unity after numbers on the input box barre bottom or these one are too small?
Say "13.00 cm" when Centimeters is input as General Options

Hi Pilou, no currently there is no way to see unit labels on input boxes, unless you use feet&inches units which has the foot and inch marks as part of the numeric display.

I've thought some about adding that, but it is somewhat difficult for me to add stuff to the bottom bar without a fair amount of testing since it is close to being full on some configurations like a 1024x768 screen...

It's possible to add it, but it is something that I have to approach a bit carefully.

- Michael

No problem reassured again :)