> an arc of an half circle of course :)

Yup, but although it is similar, it is not the correct shape. A sine curve is kind of more of a lump, it doesn't have the exact shape of an arc.


> K3Dsurf seems the best It has an OBJ export
> Rest to found a transform obj -->nurbs :)

This may be a difficult transform. But didn't Amapi do something for this when exporting polygons to IGES? I thought that some wireframe line curves came through. So that is one possibility.

But it looks like K3Dsurf only does surfaces and not curves - for doing curves possibly that other one will work.

- Michael

Half circle and Scaled on 1 or 2 directions successively with subtil axes of deformations :)

PS Yes Amapi has Iges , and Rhino has a plug named Smurf I believe

And you can draw in k3Dsurf curves just take the good parameters for have a slicy slice :)
And export it as OBJ : that works (Button is named "Edit" but It's also save ! :)
Sure it's a pity to not profit of the Surfaces :) :I don't want to be the triangles of this curve :D

Hi Michael,

I'm just wondering if it's at all possible to have Height & Width with the Draw Curve > Eclipse > Centre.
So that it would work like you've already got with the Draw Curve > Rectangle > Centre.

From a Jewellers perspective, this would make life much easier than having to count the grid spaces when creating an oval.

regards Colin

Hi Colin, I'll try to add that in.

In the meantime, you can use "Distance constraint" to help out right now.

To do this, just type in your distance and hit enter (you can also click on the "d" text box down on the bottom bar).

Doing that activates distance constraint which forces the point that is being picked to be that distance away from the base point. So for Ellipse/Center that would be 1/2 the width since the base point is the ellipse center point in that case. So you would actually need to enter in half of your desired full width for this one. Still easier than counting grid spaces though.

But I'll try to add in a width/height like rectangle so you won't have to divide in half.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Thanks for that advice, I'll give it a try.
So far I've been getting around it by creating a Rectangle the exact size I want.
Then I just select the Eclipse & have it snap to that Rectangle edges.
Delete the Rectangle & continue from there.

regards Colin

Hi Colin, I've added a Width and Height control for the ellipse command for the next beta. You still need to click 3 points to finish the ellipse even if you enter a width and height, because those points define the orientation of the ellipse. In 2D the 3rd point doesn't really do anything if you have entered a height, but in 3D you can switch to the front viewport (or track along a z line in the 3D view) to orient the ellipse vertically.

This was the last thing I wanted to fix up for this beta so it is almost ready.

- Michael

Hi Pilou, one way to fill a hole is to remove surface trims.

Here are some steps on how to do that - this shows the steps for removing a hole in a cube:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=444.4

Here is a longer tutorial about removing holes on a more complex object:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=446.17


There will probably be another "fill in hole" tool at some point called N-Sided Patch. I might be able to do this one soon, I'm not quite sure yet.


Moving a hole can be pretty difficult, especially if there is stuff attached to it. It will be quite a while before I'll be able to work on this one, although probably this will get better with more history support, if you could control the history of how the hole was originally created. There should be more stuff for that in V2.

- Michael

Sure.... I had thinking an automatic filling hole :)

Symmetry by 3 points

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

great job!

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