Hi Rainer -

> A offset curve command which does not yield a million
> overlapping line segments would be great 8)

If you've got an example that you've got a problem with, could you please send me the file at moi@moi3d.com or post it here?

Do you possibly have a messy starting curve that already starts out with a million little overlapping bits in it to begin with?

If you want to reduce control point density, then the Rebuild command can work well for that - that's different than having overlapping line segments though.


(EDIT: oops at first I thought this was on Mike's thread and I wrote about starting a new thread but forget that)

- Michael

Michael,

I love that the lines and curves in MoI are anti-aliased. They give a smooth appearance and really do justice to the smooth nature of Bezier type splines.

As a plus, even the corners are perceptively pointy and purely triangular.


However, I noticed that the edges of surfaces and edges (especially with the curves and edges turned off from view) are not anti-aliased. Just left jagged.

I can gather that providing this treatment to the video card rendering would slow it down severely, IF the model was in motion.

But could there be a way to provide this feature when not changing the view-port. Or in other words, a second after movement has stopped,

an anti-aliased version could be updated. On top of that, this complete anti-aliasing of all edges, surfaces and curves could be done only during idle time,

during the instant that there are no calculations, or mouse movement. Being an optional flag in the setup dialog of course.

Moving the view functions, such as panning, dolly and so forth would be done without anti-aliasing as in the past.

But as soon as you stop and look at your work: Man, would it look just that much better.


Maybe this is card dependent or not even possible?... It's just a nifty thought for suggestion.

Thanks, Mike

Hi Mike, yup that is certainly possible to have anti-aliasing on surfaces only, unless you have a lower memory (like less than 256MB say) video card.

That's something that I haven't focused on very much yet because under normal operation you've got the edges being drawn on top of most of those areas which obscures that stuff. Also there is a speed hit involved with doing the surface antialiasing, although this is minimal on modern cards.

But anyway since there are some potential performance consequences of turning it on, it's not something that I can just blindly switch on - it needs some testing with a variety of machines to make sure that it does not get turned on for the more basic and low memory video card situations and cripple those basic cards. Maybe it's something that you'll have to switch on yourself manually in options rather than on by default.

Anyway, it's mostly because under regular operation the edges cover up many of those areas that it has just not been a priority so far at all.

- Michael

Thanks for the insight Michael, if there ever was the option, it would have to be 'off' by default for those reasons.

These are things I would like most to see in MoI and think they would benefit most people using the software

- Surface continuity tools.
- Rebuild surface tool to clean up your surfaces where there a lots of bunched points which happens with many commands like network and 2 rail sweep.
- Ability to sculpt surfaces like Tsplines. (I know, I know you should be using a sub'd modeller for this but far easier if you could do the whole model in nurbs rather than parts of it. Its also far easier to do further work with booleans on nurbs surfaces rather the poly meshes).
- variable radius filleting.
- Patch surface tool for filling holes and where surface continuity is req'd

Some other notes
- Join tool is too model size dependent. Most of the time it doesn't work for me without scaling the model down in size all the time so it would be nice to get further work done on this tool.

Rebuild does exist and there is a reconstruct command too.

Hi Ed...There is a rebuild.. But not for "surfaces".....

My mistake!

Hi all.

here is something I would like to see in V3. In the file I supply, you can see on the default style we have 4 surfaces, on union we have the union command applied, on join we have the join command applied and both give us a solid. But I would like the option to create a solid more like the Final result style shows, where there is a pretty nice and clean solid with no multisegment edge and basically no undesired edge and of course no seams.

May be it could be a kind of solid rebuild kind of command. This is the way I think Michael would implement such a thing.

Regards,
Felix

I am still hoping for some basic 2d text and dimensions ... so that 2d drawings in MoI can noted without using another program.
cheers,
eric

Hi Felix,

> But I would like the option to create a solid more like
> the Final result style shows, where there is a pretty nice
> and clean solid with no multisegment edge and basically
> no undesired edge and of course no seams.

Being able to remove edges between surfaces means that the surfaces need to be combined into one larger single surface.

That becomes difficult when the surfaces are touching at internal trimmed edges rather than at a natural edge of their underlying surfaces.

Please see this FAQ entry for some more description on trimmed surfaces and underlying surfaces:

http://moi3d.com/wiki/FAQ#Q:_Why_does_show_points_work_for_some_objects_but_not_others.3F

In your particular case here it looks like you want to have the edge removed between these 2 surfaces:



But look at how the control points of the upper planar surface are positioned - (use edit>separate to break it into a single individual surface and then you can turn on its control points):




Then look at how the control points of the rounded side piece are positioned:




So you can see there that the top planar surface has just 4 control points for its surface and they are not located anywhere near the actual edge - that's because that's a trim edge. Trim edges mark regions of a surface that are holes or cut off areas.

So because those 2 underlying surfaces have no alignment between them in their surface control point grid, there isn't really any way for MoI to glue them together into a single surface - to make a single surface means to make one single rectangular control point grid out of them.

A rebuild that would do that would be trying to rebuild the surface only by looking at its trim edges and not by looking at the actual surface itself - that kind of rebuild would be sensitive to all kinds of variations in edge topology and would be quite difficult to implement...

Anyway, I just wanted to give you some explanation of why that request is quite difficult to achieve.

In your final example it looks like you've used a totally different method to create that, probably something like a revolve? It's very difficult for a computer algorithm to be able to sense stuff like that to try and recognize that a revolve of some larger edge would work to rebuild those surfaces - just in general things that rely on judgment are difficult to implement in a processing algorithm without stuff like artificial intelligence.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I didn`t do any trimming on purpuse or by myself, so I`m surprise to see that the planar command did this. I understand Nurbs are a different breed then meshes and I believe I`ll have live with those kind of particularities.

Basically I created the profile of the top and bottom surface used planar and then blend them together. After your reply I tried to shrink it but the rectangular control point setup stays it`s just smaller.

If I understand correctly, there is basically no way to work around this natural behaviour of Nurbs except by building the part differently as I did with the final part.

I think you have planned something like a property page, would this provide a mean to "hide" these kind of edges and also the seam type of edge and that these properties wouldn`t be affected by other commands that control the visibility of object? In other words, something like local properties can not be affected by higher level or more global properties?

As for the multi segment, I understand better now where they come from and if I don`t like them it`s my problem...

Thanks,
Felix

MoI is a great modeling app... My 5 wishes are:

1. Better history handling. I really love Max's modifiers stack and the way it works.
2. Object grouping and named selection sets.
3. Material and texture handling. Maybe an option to create shadows for better presentation.
4. Some more classic commands like bend, taper etc... for simple transformation
5. More 2d functions like dims and text for better communication and presentation...

Hi JTB - for named selection sets you can currently assign a name to any selection of objects. Do that by clicking on the name line in the properties panel:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference11.htm#propertiespanel

Once you have assigned a name, it will show up in the Objects section of the scene browser and you go to there to do various actions like hide it, lock it, and also select it.

So using that method you can set up a name associated with a set of objects and then go select that same set later on - does that cover what you are thinking of for named selection sets?

- Michael

Thank you... I'm getting old!!!

I really need/want a shear/skew tool, unless there is a way to currently do this that I don't know about.

I would also love a non destructive fillet command. I usually get my shapes built and then I feel this great anxiety when I fillet the edges because there is no going back! I know I can have a version of the object that hasn't been filleted, but it would be great to have some sort of non destructive filleting, that would let you undo it at any time in the future.

Michael, I second that on the Shear(Skew) tool. Could work like the scale tools on the side panel. Doesn't have to be part of the on-View handlebar setup.

On the same token, an adjustable Taper tool as well.
I think both would work on a simple transform calculation.

Andy, check this out:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4382.1

I think they could work by making just a button that activates 3d grips like the 2d that already exists, even better if you right clic one of those 2d grips the 3d ones could appear!

Recently I've been many times in the same situation: I have 2 or more curves and I want to draw something (a polyline, a circle or an interpolated curve) that touch those curves but with all the points sharing a single plane. What i have done is to copy those curves, trim them with a plane and then used the end points of that new trimmed curves for snapping the thing I want to draw. Those are a lot of steps for something as simple as drawing a circle.

What do you think about this feature?: Making two construction lines that starts on the same point makes a temporary cplane. I think this could be useful in many situations not just the one I described above.

Doesn't the "CPlane" command already do that?

If you place Construction Lines where you like, you can use this:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/#KeepCLine
to keep them in place.

Hi Andy,

> I really need/want a shear/skew tool, unless there is a way
> to currently do this that I don't know about.

I am planning on having a Shear command as part of the Transform > Deform tools.

In the meantime you can make a shear happen by using the new Flow command.

To do that, draw a plane using Draw solid > Plane, placed under your object, and then copy the plane off to the side. Turn on control points for the copied plane and drag the upper 2 points over to create a sheared plane like so:



Now select the object you want to shear, run the Transform > Deform > Flow command, choose the plane under the object as the base surface, and the sheared plane as the target surface and you'll produce a shear like this:





> I would also love a non destructive fillet command.

I'd like to have that eventually as part of a deeper history mechanism. It will require quite a lot of work so I'm not sure exactly when that will happen.

In the meantime if you need to edit fillets there are some other programs like SpaceClaim that can help you tweak things like that more easily right now:
http://www.spaceclaim.com/ - you should be able to load your MoI model into SpaceClaim (copy and paste between them also works) and it has methods for editing fillets and also tweaking things like pulling or angling a face.

- Michael