Hi Pilou - there are 2 modes for sweep, "auto-place", and "non-auto-place".

Right now the mode is determined depending on whether the shape curves have any point of them inside the bounding box of the rail curve.

So imagine a box around the rail curve - if your profile shapes are inside that box (as one of them is in your file, the one that is closest to it), then MoI will not move your shapes around and will sweep them in their current orientation.

If all your profiles are outside of the box around the rail curve, then MoI will use "auto-place" mode and will rotate and place your curves perpendicular to the rail. This is a useful mode for doing things like a tube or pipe type shape quickly.

So if you want to use auto place mode to have them automatically moved perpendicular to the rail, make sure your profile curves are a little distance away from your rail curve and not next to it.

I would like to figure out a way to make this mode have some kind of switch or more controllable option, right now it is sort of hidden.


> Sometime it's "flat", sometime it's good ???

The "flat" ones are the ones that included the shape curve that was inside the box around the rail. MoI will not move your shapes around if they are closer to the rail because it assumes you may have placed them in a particular position.

Let me know if you need more details on this.

- Michael

Full understand :)
That was the solution of the mystery! ;)
Now that work at any time :)
And the fun of the thing is that you can move or modify the line or the circles (show points) for best controls of the sections or path!

So do you plan to have a function to draw the bounding box of a selection?

> So do you plan to have a function to draw the bounding box of a selection?

Eventually yes, but not for V1 though.

- Michael

A new little tut by Steph about pipes :)
http://tutoriels.steph3d.net/MoI/Tube01/tut.mov

Cool use of the helpers perpendicular :)

And of course you can also modify any circular section (size, position, form)

Does Moi will have a dedicated pipes maker?
For example in the automatic "auto-place mode" perpendicular section don't appear on the path (except extremities)

> Does Moi will have a dedicated pipes maker?

Possibly sometime later, not for V1 though. But I'm not sure that it is really necessary because of the stuff already built into sweep.

To make a simple pipe in V1 you can use the auto-place mode that you were just asking about - just draw a circle a distance away from the curve, and when you do the sweep it will automatically place it perfectly perpendicular to the rail curve for you. That's really pretty simple.

The nice benefit of this over a dedicated pipe tool is that it is more general purpose - it allows you to use other shapes instead of just a circle, such as squares, stars, polygons, or arbitrary sketched curves. Just draw them flat on the plane in a rough left-to-right order for multiple profiles.

It is true that a dedicated pipe tool has less steps, but it is more restricted to only circular shape sections and unless you're modeling something like a plate of pasta, the difference in time is not very significant. MoI's auto-place mode already makes it pretty easy to create a simple pipe.

But I would like to make some UI to give a bit more control over triggering the auto place mode though.

It looks like Steph would be interested in the new scaling rail function that I added a couple of betas ago - that allows you to guide the shape of a pipe by using one exterior additional guide rail instead of drawing a whole bunch of different sections. For example, here is a simple pipe constructed using auto-place mode:



Then applying the scaling rail (click the "Pick scaling rail" button inside of sweep):



There are several benefits over using the scaling rail instead of drawing many cross-sections. First of all there are fewer curves to draw (just 3 curves drawn in this example!) so it can be created faster. You also get a lot more precise control over the exact shaping because you more directly control the entire profile of the entire surface instead of trying to control it by adding different radii only at particular points. The scaling rail also makes it a lot easier to manipulate the shape by history edits.

So if he needs to make a lot of lumpy pipes like that, tell him about auto-place mode plus a scaling rail, that should make it quite a bit easier.

- Michael

> For example in the automatic "auto-place mode" perpendicular section
> don't appear on the path (except extremities)

Hi Pilou - that's not correct, auto-place mode will place perpendicular sections along the interior of the rail as well, not just only at extremities. For example here I have 3 sections. Just arrange them in a rough left-to-right order:



Each profile is placed perpendicular to the rail curve, spaced evenly along it. In this case the outside 2 curves are on the ends of the rail, but the middle ellipse is placed at the center of the curve. You can put any number of profiles in a similar way. The spacing between the profiles on the plane doesn't matter, they will get spaced in even increments along the rail.

But don't forget - it can be better to use a scaling rail if you want to control the size at different points instead of placing a bunch of scaled profiles. But if you want slightly different shapes (instead of only changes in size), then that's when you would do different profiles.

You can also use multiple profiles and the scaling rail in combination.

- Michael

A lot of possibilities indeed :)
<The spacing between the profiles on the plane doesn't matter, they will get spaced in even increments along the rail
It's that who is a little pertubing because we can't see easily the middle of the curve where is the ellipse :)