Hi Jamie - I see, but what about instead of having an option to keep the plug as a separate object, there was something like a "grooved" option that would automatically shrink the plug down and union it to the main body?

Would that handle what you are thinking of with the plug, or would there be some other possible reason to want to have the plug all by itself?

- Michael

Hi Michael

I can see a groove option being useful. Ive attached a couple of examples, the screen is a good example of an offset then needing to be kept as a separate part. The panels on the PC are not quite even insets, could you choose drag the inset curves around to make it an uneven offset? For example making the CD drawer would need a bigger offset from the bottom than the top and sides.

Just some thoughts. its also important not to have things to complicated, Im sure you will find the balance. I like this kind of semi automation it saves a lot of time. Could inset use projected curves? combined with a groove would be great. For example the buttons on the red product.

Im already happy with what you have now. Will this be a V2 thing?








regards Jamie

Hi Jamie,

> the screen is a good example of an offset then needing to be kept
> as a separate part.

I think you should be able to get very close to that with a "grooved" option, just set a really thin groove width... Maybe it could work to make the plug be kept as a separate part if you set Groove width = 0.


> could you choose drag the inset curves around to make it an uneven offset?

That would definitely be cool, but unfortunately it would be extremely difficult to set that up for the general case, because this mechanism can be applied to a lot more than just a 4-sided box area.

Like here for example:






The face being inset does not even need to be planar:




> For example making the CD drawer would need a bigger offset
> from the bottom than the top and sides.

Right now probably what you would do would be to extrude one of those side faces to make a box which you could then boolean union with the main piece to fill in some area to make it uneven.

In the future I'd like to make this easier by allowing you to edit a model by grabbing a face and sliding it around, but it will be a while before that will be possible.


> Could inset use projected curves?

No, not currently - the way it functions is similar to offset or shell, meaning it constructs pieces by offsetting existing surfaces in the model and does not take in any custom drawn curves.

I do want to have something in the future that would let you more easily carve a model in various ways with curves (in addition to how you can do it now by booleaning out holes), but it will require a much different mechanism than what this is currently doing.


> Will this be a V2 thing?

Yup, it looks like it since it has come together really quickly.

- Michael

Hi Michael

Thanks for the clarification, it will be a good addition to the tools with the groove function added in. I glad it will be in V2

I am looking forward to see how V3 shapes up with your ideas on carving with curves. Although I think you should have a good holiday after V2 is released.

Kind regards

Jamie

Hi
Michael this Inset will be great and a big time saver! (maybe in V2?).
About to keep the cut piece after Inset: (Im french and cannot really follow/understand prec. posts about that)
it can be usefull for making lids, trap ddors, to save the cutted part
i.e. battery trap doors with first inset, then another inset bigger for battery housing.

Hi Jamie, one way that it will be possible to work with curves with this initially would be to use the curves to carve the base solid up into smaller solids, then you can inset the top faces of the smaller pieces.

You can use the Boolean Merge command to cut a solid by a profile curve and leave all the pieces behind.

That looks something like this:





So that combination may be a good way to effectively use curves already.

- Michael

I'm going to use this new function like crazy. My sincerest thanks.

So glad this made it into V2 (and the current beta)!

Excellent work Michael :D

Michael,
I was working the label can model and wanted to inset command the face on the can. The inset command will complete on "inwards" but produce nothing with "outwards". I can offset the surface and shell it to get the job done though. Are you interested in seeing these types of models yet? I know you said it's new and will be refined, So no need to be bombed with insets that fail, but if you want the model "pre-inset", I'll post it.

All sharp corners.

Hi Burr - the "sharp corners" part that I was talking about previously was actually meaning how multiple surfaces touch one another, not necessarily how the trim curves of one surface are arranged...

But yeah if you can post it I'll take a look - most likely it will be a case that is having difficulty with the geometry library's offsetter and probably not much that I can do about it directly but it is worth a check.

It will not be unusual to see failures with the new inset tool because the offset mechanism in the geometry library just has difficulties with many cases.

The Inset command internally uses solid offsetting a couple of times in sequence, so any difficulty in the offset calculation will cause it to fail.

- Michael

Here's the file. I only post it in hopes it helps you with something. But not for any particular need I have. No need to post back a file that "Works" for me or anything. It only appeared that it should work from what I understood of your previous explanation, so I brought it up, but I wont inundate you with circumstances where it doesnt work.

Hi Burr, yeah that's actually the _non_ sharp cornered kind of case.

You've got 2 surfaces here joined together:



And check out this edge for example where they join:




The 2 surfaces are completely smooth to one another at that joined edge rather than touching each other at a sharp edge. That can cause additional difficulties.

You can actually get it to work in this case for Direction = Outwards if you use Edit > Separate to break that surface into an individual part rather than having it smoothly connected to the other piece.

I will actually take a closer look at this case though, because the Inset command is supposed to make an attempt to use the surface as an individual part automatically and ignore the connections to neighboring surfaces if it was having problems with the offset.

- Michael

In this area TopMod is a crazzy Poly prog for some Inset function ;)

http://www.topmod3d.org/ (free)

Hello Michael,

I like the new Inset command a lot from the first tries I had. For me it looks like a most promising way to generae quick and clean grooved-in panels in plane fuselages. Unfortunately, it seems to have quite a lot of trouble in some cases but not in others, so that it is a hit and miss matter. Usually, as indicated already, it is obvious that the geometry is way too complex for MoI to make sense of it but some other times it is very puzzling. Consider the following example:



I Boolean_Merged three simple shapes with a cylinder. The rectangle and the circle produced perfect inset panels, with an outer rim and a groove as per the distances indicated, but the oval shape, that seems to be just as smooth and regular as the other two, failed and produced something of a mess, which I found regrettable. There are definitely easy workarounds for cases like this, but still, it is a pity.

I attach the 3dm file in case you want to have a look.

Jean-Paul

Hi Jean-Paul, yeah unfortunately you will probably run into many things that will not inset, particularly with curved pieces.

The Inset command needs to do a combination of several complex calculations, including a solid offset, then a boolean merge with some coincident surfaces involved, then an additional solid offset that shrinks down the "plug".

There can be problems with any of those steps, but in particular the offset function in the geometry library that I use can only handle pretty simple cases where there is no change in topology in the generated offset.

When you have a face that is completely smooth with its surrounding area, that will require a topology change in the offset. Here I'll try to explain it -

So one part of Inset is that it tries to calculate an offset of the set of faces surrounding your selected one, where the only the selected face is actually offset and the other surrounding faces stay in place, like this:





Then each of those surfaces gets extended and intersected with each other to form connections in the offset as necessary.

But the geometry library offset is set up to expect that for each vertex and edge of the original that there will be a matching vertex and edge in the offset result. That's not always the case though, like when you have a smoothly connecting face, it will try to do something like this:





So note there that when the offset tries to get extended in that case it won't actually intersect with the neighboring face, really some additional faces need to be inserted in there, which means a change in topology which is not currently handled directly by the offsetter.

The Inset command will try to solve this when possible by trying to take the face as a completely separate surface and ignoring its connections to adjacent faces. It's easier for that additional topology to be inserted properly when there were completely unattached edges in those spots. That's the only reason why the other examples on the same surface for the circle and rectangle parts actually worked. Sometimes you may need to manually separate out a smooth surface though.

I think in your case with the ellipse part that it's probably running into the other difficult area of doing the merge with coincident surfaces though, that's also a difficult calculation as well...


Still there may be some potential improvements that I can make, possibly the merging difficulties may be easier to do something about than offset problems.


Currently it will tend to have an easier time with more blocky types of shapes.


- Michael

Hi Jean-Paul, I examined your elliptical inset problem on a cylinder, and it seems to be failing due to an incorrect offset being created by the geometry library.

So unfortunately that's not going to be something easy for me to fix anytime soon.

As part of the Inset process, it creates a "plug" object, which in your elliptical case looks like this: (3DM geometry file also attached):



Then it wants to produce an offset of that plug, keeping the top and bottom surfaces in place and only offsetting the vertical one.

That offset is getting all messed up, you can kind of see a similar problem if you open up the attached 3DM file and just offset it using the regular Construct > Offset command, it creates this:



You can see that's not a proper offset.

When the geometry library's offset mechanism creates a bad result like this, it will prevent the Inset command from working properly.


< ..... After some more examination ....>


But one of the problems in this case seems to be related to the vertical surface being a single closed surface.

It does look like there is a possible work-around for some cases like this which is to split a closed edge so that it becomes 2 edges intead of one, you can do that by selecting the edge and running Trim, with the "Add trim points" option to pick a splitting point on the side opposite of where the edge's seam is (to see the seam extrude it and watch where the seam edge is on the extruded surface). Like this:





Once that edge is split into 2 edges instead of a single closed one, then Inset seems to actually work on that face:




So that's something you can try for that case right now, and I'll take a look at doing that closed edge splitting automatically inside of the Inset command.

- Michael

Michael,
Did you know that if you run "seperate" on your plug, that it then offsets nicely?

ooops. I see that the seperation of the surfaces you are also refering to as the poor result. Not just the "Streamer".

Hi Burr, yeah when you separate things into individual surfaces, it reduces a lot of the complexity involved in the offset because it doesn't have to try to extend stuff anymore.

But without extensions there will be all kinds of gaps between the offset pieces, like if you separate a box into 6 individual surfaces and offset them you'll see that kind of result.

- Michael

Thought I was a genius! Found out I was a novice....