Hi Michael,

Just wondering if the Blend function could/will be enhanced further in the future to include more control like Depth and Skew control for instance? I'm guessing 'Bulge' is Tangent Magnitude.

Cheers

Hi Danny, I definitely want to improve Blend in the future but the currently the main goal for it is to be able to handle a string of edges on either side rather than just 1 edge on each side.

I'm not really familiar with what "Depth" or "Skew" would do, could you describe those or show an example?

Yeah Bulge could be described as Tangent Magnitude.

- Michael

Hi Michael,
> Yeah Bulge could be described as Tangent Magnitude.

Actually, looking into this further I think Bulge in MoI relates to Depth of the overall Blend curve, Tangent Magnitude is the adjustment of the magnitude (height) at each end.




Skew is related to which parent curve you want to dominate the bulge.






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Hi Danny, well Bulge is basically a scaling factor applied to the blend curve tangents.

If you do a blend between curves in MoI and then turn on the control points of the blend segment, you'll be able to see how it works.

For example here is one G1 blend between 2 curves, with the blend control points turned on afterwards:



With a reduced bulge, it scales the tangents down, you can see here where the interior 2 points are closer to the ends:




Instead of a skew factor, I think I would be more likely to try to have an option to separate out the bulge into 2 sliders so that the bulge of each side could be manipulated independently, and if you wanted one side to dominate you would crank just that side up some more.

But I think that getting longer chains of edges to work first is probably more of a priority though.

- Michael

Hi Danny, also in MoI the distance between the endpoints being blended is part of the calculation.

I'm not sure if that distance is what you're referring to as a "depth" ?

But if it is, that does not tend to be a good thing to have to set manually especially on surface blending where the edges being blended may be varying in distance between one another. It's good for the blend to automatically take this base distance into account so that it doesn't make things like a bunch of "extra material" showing up in the blend in areas where the edges happen to come closer to one another.

- Michael

Hi Danny, here is an example of the kind of thing that does not tend to work very well if the blend is specified as having a kind of absolute width for it rather than being based off of a scale factor applied to the distance between 2 matching points:





- Michael

Hi Michael,

> I think I would be more likely to try to have
> an option to separate out the bulge into 2
> sliders so that the bulge of each side could
> be manipulated independently

Yes, that would nice, I just felt sometimes we needed that little bit of extra control in the shape of a blend.
Are you going to try this out to see if it fits or will it be a future thing, either way it would be good to have ?

Thanks for looking into this!

Cheers

"Hi Danny, I definitely want to improve Blend in the future but the currently the main goal for it is to be able to handle a string of edges on either side rather than just 1 edge on each side."

That would be great. The more I use MoI, the more I realize "blend is your friend". It makes easy work of a lot of situations, and any enhancements would be welcomed. I assume if blend could handle multiple edges then it could be used like a patch?

As great as all the UI and organization enhancements have been, I look most forward to enhancements like this in the basic modeling functions.

Ed

Hi Danny,

> Are you going to try this out to see if it fits or will it be
> a future thing, either way it would be good to have ?

It's an idea for the future - I'm not going to be able to get that in for v2.

- Michael

Hi Ed,

> I assume if blend could handle multiple edges
> then it could be used like a patch?

Well, not really because it will still be something that is a connection between 2 different sides, just that each side would possibly be a chain of several edges touching end to end.

Patch is different and instead of taking "2 sides", it takes a closed loop of curves/edges.

You can kind of think of Blend as being more like a 2-rail sweep, just with the profile curves being created for you automatically.

- Michael