Would it be possible to have a Bend along curve option. It would go well with your new boolean curves to form shoe treads, tires and stuff like that.

> Symmetry by 3 points

Hi Pilou, I've got this one on my list (defining mirror plane by 3 points), but I don't think I'm going to be able to get to it for V1. I should be able to get it for V2 though.

- Michael

> beautifull soft, for me, a dwg or dxf import (2d at least) would
> be a great enhancement...

Hi tmaes, thanks I'm glad you like it! I would like to add DXF/DWG support in the future, but it will take kind of a chunk of work to do it so I have had to postpone it from the 1.0 version.

- Michael

> Would it be possible to have a Bend along curve option. It would go well with
> your new boolean curves to form shoe treads, tires and stuff like that.

Hi Grendel - it is unfortunately quite difficult to do this properly.

For regular transforms like move/rotate/scale/mirror, transforming the control points of a NURBS surface is the same thing as transforming the definition of the surface itself perfectly.

I mean if you have a NURBS sphere and you scale the control points it has the exact same effect as scaling the "ideal" sphere.

But bending is not like this - if you bend the control points of a NURBS surface along an arc shape, the actual surface geometry is not bent precisely at the same arc shape. It will kind of follow the general bend, but it won't be exact - this is a problem because in an assembly where there are a bunch of different surfaces that are trimmed and joined together, if some of them are not precisely transformed in relation to each other, it will cause gaps to open up in places where there are supposed to be shared edges.

So that's why there tends to not be a lot of "bendability" of NURBS solids. Things that do support it (like the new stuff in Rhino V4) do a lot of work to "refit" the surfaces by adding extra points until they conform to the transformation with enough accuracy.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

How do you feel about "drill-in" mode for composite curves?
Sometimes I want to handle (e.g. delete or mirror it) curve which is a part of (joined) curve; in this case I have to separate curve first, handle desired part and re-joined the rest. It would be simpler If I could select a segment of curve by clicking on desired part of previously selected curve.

Petr

> How do you feel about "drill-in" mode for composite curves?

Hi Petr, I would like to do something for this eventually. But when I was looking at it originally, it involved enough work that I decided to postpone it a while.

It's more than just selection work, for example you mention delete - to make delete work in this way would require modifications to delete. Similarly many commands might need to be tweaked to deal with this kind of input (curve segment selected instead of full curve selected). So that adds up to a fair amount of work which made it a good candidate to postpone from the V1 release.

There are a couple of other complications too - one thing is that it is a bit hard to think of a good way to represent this drill-in graphically. I mean what should I do to make it look like the segment is going to become the only selection with an additional click? I guess put a dark halo around all the other segments? This would have a pretty large visual impact on the way that curve selection works now. And it would mean that curve deselection would take 2 clicks instead of the 1 click to deselect as currently.

So one thing I've thought about is to not have a drill-in method for segment selection and instead have that as one of the available filter modes when selection filters are available. The way that would work is you would have the curve unselected, then set the filter mode to segment. Now when you picked on the curve it would only pick segments of the curve instead of the full curve. I was thinking this might be less generally disruptive. But then you have to remember to switch the filter mode back to "auto" or whatever when you are finished.

What do you think?

- Michael

[I wrote]
>>> Could it be possible to leave object(s) selected after joining or separating
>>> them using Join/Separate command?
[you wrote]
>This should be pretty easy to do, I guess I had better make the objects flash so that there is >a visual cue that something happened to them.

Hello, what's this then? :) I am so sorry about it. I should have been a bit more wordy when I had asked for your opinion concerning state of object after using Join/Separate commands.

It's okay with joining. The stuff flash and keep selected. Unfortunately, when separating a face/faces I would expect that only separated object/objects keep selected instead of all part of original object. It means that current behaviour is alright when exploding a whole object otherwise not.

Maybe other guys should give their opinion, since I am too hooked on Rhino's environment...

Petr

Hi Michael,

>>What do you think?

I admit "drill-in" method for curves is somewhat less useful than for (poly)surfaces, but still useful. So solution using filter mode, you was thinking of, would match my needs. Of course, I can do without it for V1... hehe..

Petr

Hi Petr,

> Unfortunately, when separating a face/faces I would expect that only
> separated object/objects keep selected instead of all part of original object.

Yes, that makes sense, I forgot about that scenario when I tweaked it.

This should not be hard to fix up.

- Michael

Hello Michael, Hello All,

Let me start by saying that I like MOI very much. I do like to make abstract surfaces and objects for rendering. What I do need for that are the essentials options: bend and twist ( as seen in many modelling applications). Would it be possible to add this to V1? If V1 would include a good manual (currently I'm spending too much time trying to find out what things are doing) and the options bend and twist: you could absolutely count me as a new customer!

Best regards.

Hans

Hi Hans,

> bend and twist ( as seen in many modelling applications). Would it be possible to add this to V1?

No unfortunately I don't expect to be able to add these for version 1.0. It will actually be quite a while before these will be possible.

Probably the other modeling applications that you are referring to use polygon mesh surfaces. Those are a lot easier to twist and bend. MoI does not use polygon mesh surfaces, instead it uses NURBS surfaces. It is a lot more difficult to calculate twists and bends on NURBS surfaces, although NURBS surfaces do have advantages in other areas such as Boolean operations.

Here are a couple other recent posts that describe the problem in some more detail:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=523.13
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=412.103

There will be a manual though.

- Michael

Bitmap tracing, Inkscape uses an existing library for this that works quite well.

PO Trace, http://potrace.sourceforge.net/

Works very in inkscape. Tracing a simple bitmap with Moi would be killer. :)

> PO Trace, http://potrace.sourceforge.net/

Looks cool! Unfortunately I can't use the library directly because it uses the GPL license, which means it is only allowed to be directly included in other open source programs.

- Michael

I'd like to have something like a button i can push to bring up a small window where i see all the objects and curves in my scene and then i can select the objects/curves i want from there and also reverse my selection. This is useful when you have large complex objects and selecting them only based on what you see in the viewport isn't always easy, it's kinda difficult.

Also i'd like to be able to export a selected object from a large assembly if possible, i can't remember if this can be done already so that's why i write here now. If this can be done already then ignore this request.

Many thanks in advance

/ Magnus

Hi Magnus,

> I'd like to have something like a button i can push to bring up a small window
> where i see all the objects and curves in my scene and then i can select the
> objects/curves i want from there and also reverse my selection.

Yeah, this kind of object manager / object browser is probably the biggest missing thing in MoI right now. But it is going to take quite a bit of work to add a really good one, so this is something that I have planned to work on for version 2.0 of MoI, I won't be able to get this into the 1.0 version. But it is pretty much up at the top of the list for working on after version 1.0 is out.


> Also i'd like to be able to export a selected object from a large assembly if possible,

This one is possible using File / Export. Export really means "Export selected". But right now it will only export complete objects that are selected, it won't do a sub-selection currently. So if you want to export just a few faces from a solid for example, you will need to use Edit/Separate on them to break them into separate full objects, then you can export those full objects.

- Michael

Dear Michael,

A stupid question for a super beginner like me.
Will V1 have a measurement tool,
where I can get the distance in between two points, example?

Thank you,
Rudy

You can do this now, just draw a line between the two points. Pick start point and move to your endpoint. Don't click on it, just read the distance at the bottom of the screen, d nnn < nnn. By using these numbers there, you can even draw lines of specific length and angle.

Hi Rudy, as JTB mentions right now the method is to draw a line and watch that distance control in the bottom bar.

Also, Petr has made a custom command for measuring distance, which you can install to give MoI a new distance command, he has details here: http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/ (look for "Measure Distance"). That might be useful.

I expect to put in a bunch of "Analyze" related commands such as distance, length, volume calculations, etc.. for the V2 version of MoI.

- Michael

Thank you
Michael,
Thank you
JBT.

Hi Michael,

I know I'm getting way ahead of what you need to do to get ready for version 1, but this discussion about measurements has gotten me thinking about bounding boxes...is there anything in MoI's coding that could scripted to make a bounding box that reports the X,Y,Z dimensions of an object? It seems it would have to come after the distance and length tools are developed.
A BB manager would give one a lot of flexibility for measuring and re-sizing objects *on the fly* from either an area or volume center, or in combination with object snaps, the option to quickly measure and scale in 1 or 2 D. If you made it part of the object properties feature that you're planning to add, scaling (and re-location) could be done by entering new numbers for X, Y & Z length and position... and a tool that relocates an object to the origin, could be an offshoot of this.

-just some ideas for the future. :-)

-Jesse