By the way, for all of you who are interested in this concept of nature's laws of construction
there is a beautiful animated short movie created by Cristóbal Vila shown on vimeo:

http://vimeo.com/9953368

Just get inspired ...


Jan

Minimal Surfaces

Another idea for MoI, by stressing nature again, could be based on 'minimal surfaces' as an optional style for the 'loft' tool.

Instead of choosing 'Normal', 'Loose' or 'Straight' a new 'Soap Bubble' function would calculate a surface in between
profile sections which would gain to be minimal in its surface area and therefore in its lowest 'energy level' as if it was a
soap bubble skin.

Maybe an accurate calculation of each of those surfaces would take an infinite time to be solved, yet there might be
simplifications possible to get a 'close to' but faster result.

The outcome of such a function, besides its inherent beauty, could be useful to those who seek for a good optimisation
of their models in terms of minimalism.

About the Golden Angle you can enter directly this 137.5 in the numeric keyboard for Arc Circle angle ;)

@ Pilou

Yupp! I tried, it worked!

Yet the idea is not that MoI isn't capable of somehow getting those 'points of interest' with its 'in build' tools - indeed you do get them.
The idea for this wish list is to get those points suggested automatically - if you want them to have - without doing any 'math', additional
constructions or 'typing' at all.

This way you could simply choose from those suggestions as you 'fly' and you would not get 'off focus' of what you are doing setting up
workarounds or the system itself.

Thanks to your todays comment on Sketchup and Michael's script response for the golden rectangle it has never been easier to me to work
with this concept within MoI. So thanks both of you! And it also showed what a system could provide once it is enabled to.

To finally get there I had to figure out first how to get a shortcut running in MoI, which took some time, and may not be welcomed by
other users which are less involved or interested in this sort of things... ;)

Jan

Hi Jan,

> To finally get there I had to figure out first how to get a shortcut running in MoI,
> which took some time, and may not be welcomed by
> other users which are less involved or interested in this sort of things... ;)

This part is actually quite simple, no advanced math required! :)


Just go to Options > Shortcut keys, and on the very top of the screen there is a big "Add" button - push that to add in a new shortcut key entry at the top of the list.

For the key just type in whatever key you want to trigger it, like G might work well for "golden section".

Then for the command part you just copy and paste in the script I posted above.

That's it - just "Add" and then type in G and then a paste, not really all that difficult!

In the future I do want to actually streamline the process of installing new scripts somewhat more, but I can't quite understand why these pretty simple steps would be so harsh and unwelcome like you're kind of describing them?

The whole process of just doing 3D modeling is many times more difficult than this part...

- Michael

Hi Jan,

> The idea for this wish list is to get those points suggested automatically - if
> you want them to have - without doing any 'math', additional
> constructions or 'typing' at all.

The problem though is that different people have a lot of different needs - a whole lot of people don't have any need to have a golden rectangle snap, and for those people having the snap kick in that they don't want or need is actually a negative thing instead of a positive thing.

So there tends to be a kind of balancing act on things like that - if I just threw together every single possible kind of feature that every separate person needed all turned on and combined into Moi all at the same time, that's a recipe for complexity and a "bloating" of the UI.

It's been a big goal of MoI to keep things streamlined and easy to use and avoid that type of bloating.

So in order to maintain those goals, it's an intentional thing that some types of features may not be included by default and may need some minor adjustment like the setting up of a shortcut key with a script pasted on to it in order for the functionality to be triggered.

I can understand how it would be cool if MoI had every single thing that you in particular wanted to do all set up for it right out of the box, but please keep in mind that MoI is used by a lot of different people for a lot of different kinds of things and so that kind of specific individual configuration _as a default_ is probably not likely to happen.

Just wanted to give you some more background information on some of the design constraints and problems that I have to consider when adding stuff into MoI - it's really easy to actually ruin the simplicity of MoI simply by tacking on too many things that are all competing for attention by default.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

thank you for your explanation about your difficulties to get MoI balanced out for all of its users
and the final release speaks for itself that you are doing a very good job with it.

I just wan't to point out that I do not expect any of my ideas to be implemented - even though
I like to defend them ;) - partly because of the reasons you described and also because it is always
easy to just name ideas if you are not the one to get them finally to work... ;)

Yet this shall not keep anyone to name any ideas they have as some of them may inspire you and
end up in realisation for the beneficial use of many of MoI's users.

> ... but I can't quite understand why these pretty simple steps would be so harsh and unwelcome
> like you're kind of describing them? The whole process of just doing 3D modeling is many times
> more difficult than this part...

In this you are right from your point of view as you are even capable of writing the whole program
yourself! :)

I bring this up because I use to work with some of those 'creative people' and at least those
would have stopped digging into any more detail if there wasn't a simple colored button to push... ;)

I see your point in keeping the program simple and agree with you and just wanted to give some
input out of my experience.

So next time I'll bring something up here I'll try be less destructive while defending it... ;)

Jan

Hi Jan,

> I just wan't to point out that I do not expect any of my ideas to
> be implemented - even though I like to defend them ;)

They may not get implemented as a _default_ setup, but I can certainly see them being implemented as a plug-in that you could set up on your particular installation of MoI to help you get some of your particular needed tasks to get done.

Hopefully the Golden rectangle snap that you've already just set up has been a step towards that already?

Would a golden-ratio snap on a line still be useful as a separate thing from the golden rectangle, or does that new golden rectangle snap handle what you need already?


> I bring this up because I use to work with some of those 'creative people'
> and at least those would have stopped digging into any more detail if there
> wasn't a simple colored button to push... ;)

Ok, but it's not like MoI is a program where you just push a big button and it reads your mind and pops out a finished model automatically - just doing the core function of the program of constructing 3D models is difficult enough as it (I mean I've tried to make things simplified when possible, but still there's definitely learning involved) is that if setting up a keyboard shortcut is going to be totally beyond someone's ability to learn how is it that they're going to stick with things long enough to do the stuff that's more complicated than that?

However having said all that I do definitely want to overhaul the plug-in and shortcuts system to make them more streamlined. They just have not got a whole lot of attention so far because they tend to be things you set up just once or very infrequently and not really things you need to mess with on a daily basis, so they just have not been a big target quite yet.

- Michael

Hi Jan,

> Another idea for MoI, by stressing nature again, could be based on
> 'minimal surfaces' as an optional style for the 'loft' tool.

This is another interesting idea, but it's unfortunately quite difficult to implement well with the structure of NURBS surfaces - that type of surface tends to be easier to calculate on a set of triangular meshed nodes and the method of solving it I think typically uses an iteration approach that slightly repositions the triangle vertices during the calculation process.

The way NURBS surfaces work is fairly different to that particular kind of process and so it would be quite difficult to make a NURBS type version of a minimal surface construction I think.

There is no built in support for minimal surface creation in the geometry kernel that MoI uses for a lot of NURBS calculations, so it would require a considerable amount of specialized development to even try it.

In the future I do want to work on a type of surfacing method called an "n-sided patch" which is a surface fitting technique that has a few similar elements to it though.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

the golden rectangle snap is working like a charm and does
serve my needs for it just fine It reduces the time I spend
before to construct or calculate that point manually, so
thanks again for the script and the lesson for its implementation.

I do still consider a seperate golden snap function as beeing very
interesting and a plug-in for that would be just as fine as it was inbuild.
But if it is just me and maybe just a view others it may not be worth
enough the effort of programming it.

Maybe time and a view more comments on this topic from other
users and what they may think about this will help to verify this idea.

If there is no chorus demanding there is no reason to bother.

Jan

Minimal surfaces

Somehow I knew this was going to be difficult, because whatever nature does incidentally becomes quite tricky
to get it mimicked ... ;)

Without beeing a NURBS expert at all and just for the reason of interest, if such calculations for minimal surfaces
are realized in triangular meshed nodes, wouldn't it be possible to use such nodes as an intermediate result and
acting as a control mesh by which a final NURBS surface could approximate itself to a minimal surface?

... wow, by chance I just stumbled into this plug-in for sketchup called 'Soap Skin & Bubble' which seems to be
based on the triangular meshed nodes you mentioned. The plug-in and it's functionality is shown in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcOrlX5wgLE

Actually this plugin does what I was thinking of and a review of it can be found here:

http://sketchuppluginreviews.com/2010/02/02/soap-skin-bubble-tool-google-sketchup-review/

So, if I am not mistaken, the math behind this minimal surface model is done, the plug-in is free of charge,
what could mean, that the author may happily give an inside view to his work to others...

And if a NURBS surfaces could be controlled by a polygon mesh ... - Voilà! ...

> ... so it would require a considerable amount of specialized development to even try it.

... this quote may get reduced to a fraction of its meaning... ;)

By the way, the author of that plug-in is German so let me know if you need any assistance in that language... ;)

Jan

Hi Jan, re: Minimal surface - unfortunately no it's not easy for a NURBS surface to be adapted to any general polygon mesh because a polygon mesh has arbitrary topology, while a NURBS surface requires a regular rectangular control point layout, meaning it has to have a grid of control points forming rows and columns and not just a big mass of arbitrarily connected points like a bunch of triangles can be.

- Michael

Hi Jan,

> I do still consider a seperate golden snap function as beeing very
> interesting and a plug-in for that would be just as fine as it was inbuild.
> But if it is just me and maybe just a view others it may not be worth
> enough the effort of programming it.

Tomorrow I'll take a look and see if I can cook up something to help with the line-proportion type method.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

ok, here it comes:

I installed Sketchup, the Soap Skin & Bubble plug-in, killed myself while trying to draw some simple curves in Sketchup, and did a sweep in MoI instead,


MoI: Set of curves

exported formats in between several programs to finally end up with a frame for the plug-in to do it's magic ... and it did!


Sketchup + Soap Skin & Bubble plug-in : The mesh and its formation towards a minimal surface was done automatically by the plugin

The resulting surface was then again exported several times to get a final render of it:


KeyShot: Quick render

The plug-in itself seems to work with quadrangles, at least visually. The triangulation seen in the render happened - also visually - after exporting the file.

But as I said I have no clue at all about the secrets of NURBS programming and therefore belief blind in what you say.

Maybe I can find a way to somehow re-model the surface back to MoI to go further from there.

Jan

From a commercial point of view, the "golden" formulas are used in garden design as they help naturalise views and create a more peaceful and pleasing result to the eye.

Martin

About Soap Skin and Bubble and Sketchup there is a better script!
Ferrari (free) http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=323&t=32380&p=286311 (scroll the page 6th post )

Hi Pilou,

looks promising as Ferrari seems to work even in between two closed profile curves to which
I could not manage to talk 'Soap Skin & Bubble' into so far...

Here is a direct link to download this plug-in in V 1.1 without the need of registration:
http://modelisation.nancy.archi.fr/rld/download.php?file=FerrariSketchV1.1.zip

Unfortunately it runs on Windows only, so for the Mac users among us it looks like another
installation on 'Parallels' to get a try out.

Thanks for this information!

Jan

@Pilou

Unfortunately the Ferrari plugin as well as sketchup did not work stable for me
on more complex shapes on a parallels windows emulation on MacOS Lion.

Simple shapes and reduced calculation precision and grid resolution works fine
and is really nice to play arround with.

I wonder if there are more stable solutions of such bubble skin tools available,
maybe as a stand alond program with good export options...

Jan

Hi Jan - re: minimal surface,

> The plug-in itself seems to work with quadrangles, at least visually. The triangulation seen
> in the render happened - also visually - after exporting the file.

From what you showed there it does seem to use some amount of quads but not 100% only quads - look near the boundaries of the surface and you can see a lot of them are sliced off, those ones are not quads but instead n-gons.

So you don't have a totally restricted "all quad" topology there - because of that there isn't really an automatic way to transfer from a generalized polygon mesh like that to the totally uniform MxN grid of points that a NURBS surface requires for its control polygon net.


> Maybe I can find a way to somehow re-model the surface back to MoI
> to go further from there.

If you can convert it to OBJ format, you could then use the OBJ to 3DM wireframe converter here:
http://moi3d.com/resources#Obj23dmWireframe_converter

That will convert the edges of that polygon mesh data into lines in a 3DM file, and then that 3DM file can be loaded into MoI, and you'll then have the wireframe of that model which you could use to as a snapping guide when drawing some new curves.

But just in general polygon mesh geometry like you have generated there is a pretty different form of data than NURBS geometry.

Polygon mesh data is made up of a lot of little facet pieces. NURBS geometry is made up of larger smooth spline surfaces.

It is possible to convert a broad smooth NURBS surface into polygons by dicing the surface up into little flat pieces - MoI will do that for you if you export to a polygon mesh format like OBJ, LWO, STL, SKP, ... Think of this step as similar to how you can take apples and smash them up into little bits to make applesauce.

But if you are starting with already diced up data (the faceted polygon mesh type data) and want to convert it back into big NURBS surfaces, that's basically the equivalent of wanting to start with applesauce and trying to reconstruct full apples back from the smashed up applesauce - a difficult task...

- Michael

Back to the golden ratio, why the golden rectangle cant be a default snap? I dont think it would be confusing. The cline golden snap would be very useful too!