Hi rhodesy,

> Firstly I can't believe no-one did this before sketch-up - it
> seems like such an obvious function, secondally how can
> you even patent such a simple opperation,

Unfortunately the US patent system is horribly screwed up and has allowed a ton of software things to be patented that should not have been.


> thirdly how tight is the patent and

I guess you'd need to hire a patent lawyer to really get a proper answer on this.


> how easy would it be to impliment a similar feature into moi?

Well, I do want to include an "automatic boolean" type option in MoI's extrude command which should streamline this kind of thing in MoI a bit.

My most recent idea on this is to enable an automatic boolean if you have a solid selected in addition to a curve when you do an extrusion, that could be a signal to MoI that you want to boolean the result of the extrusion with that selected solid.

- Michael

Make real time boolean don't slow down the screenplay in case of complex volumes?

Hi Pilou,

> Make real time boolean don't slow down the
> screenplay in case of complex volumes?

A couple of possibilities for avoiding that - one method could be that I would only do the boolean calculation just at the very end after you have picked the extrude distance, instead of trying to do it on every mousemove.

But it also may be possible for me to make a special case faster boolean for just this one particular purpose since it will be for curves that are sitting on a plane of the object, rather than for a fully general surface/surface intersection that the booleans normally calculate.

- Michael

When you have a multiple boolean with complex volumes that can't be "real time" ;)
So I understand when you have one / one volume that can be real time but with massive more I don't believe
like this one for example : take 2 second (on my old comput) but just for the concept ;)
Move all cylinders with the boolean function over the sphere seems problematic :)

Hi Pilou,

> When you have a multiple boolean with complex volumes
> that can't be "real time" ;)

No - not for the fully general purpose booleans, particularly when things get complex it involves a large number of calculations. A large number of calculations does not usually combine very well with "real time".

But like I was mentioning for this new possibility of doing an extrude with boolean combined, it may be possible for me to do a specialized boolean that may work faster than the regular general purpose booleans. It is probably worth a try anyway when I get a chance to work on it.


> Move all cylinders with the boolean function over the
> sphere seems problematic :)

This new function that I am talking about would not do that job - it would be for extruding a set of curves from a plane on an object, something like this:




However, the primary purpose of this is not to do a real-time boolean, it is to avoid the need to do the boolean as an additional operation to make for fewer steps in the workflow...


- Michael

Well I was hoping for realtime booleans so this fits the bill just as good!

Hopefully you'll be able to get it going, Michael.

-Will

< However, the primary purpose of this is not to do a real-time boolean, it is to avoid the need to do the boolean as an additional operation to make for fewer steps in the workflow...

OK :)

A patch has been released which seems to have stablized the software. So it can be actually tested out now (for those interested in it).

New version bonzai3d V3

http://www.formz.com/products/bonzai3d/bonzai3dFeatures.php