Hi Martin,

> Is there any reason that a zero value entered into the 'Thickness' property couldn't be made to work
> - I'm thinking that it might be a way of offsetting an entire surface by the amount entered into
> the 'Use separate height' property?

If I understand you properly, you can instead use the Construct > Offset command to generate that kind of full surface offset.


> It probably isn't important, but this is just to let you know that the conrod.3dm
> test file I supplied seems to works OK in MoI v2.

Ah, thanks for testing in v2 as well - I have taken some updates to the geometry library in v3 and there seems to be some change that has broken a couple of things that used to work before, I am going to be trying to track that down to fix it. I think it has something to do with calculating intersections involving cylinders.

- Michael

Hi Martin,

> Is there any reason that a zero value entered into the 'Thickness' property couldn't be made to work
> - I'm thinking that it might be a way of offsetting an entire surface by the amount entered into
> the 'Use separate height' property?

"If I understand you properly, you can instead use the Construct > Offset command to generate that kind of full surface offset."

Hi Michael.

What I had in mind was that it could be used to alter the thickness or width etc of the part and keep it as a solid, rather than offset a separate surface from that solid - I suppose it would be the equivalent of an 'offset face' operation in other software.



Martin.

Hi Martin, I see - but that seems like it could be odd to use Inset for such a purpose since the overall purpose and UI for Inset is focused on making something with a border around it.

Maybe the kind of thing that you're talking about would be better as a separate command or some kind of other option in Offset or Shell instead...

You can get the basics of it right now by using Edit > Separate on the face, then doing a shell, then deleting the bottom face of the shell and then joining it back in.

- Michael

This notion came about as a natural progression from playing around with Inset.
Whilst trying to find the cause of my problem, I just kept reducing the Thickness setting until I reached the point where zero was the only place left to go :-)

Offsetting the face of a solid to allow it to shrink or grow feels like it could be worth having somewhere in MoI - it'd be great ( for me) for tweaking hole and slot sizes, for instance.

Sorry Michael, but I couldn't follow this bit:- "You can get the basics of it right now by using Edit > Separate on the face, then doing a shell, then deleting the bottom face of the shell and then joining it back in." I'm probably having a blonde moment though, but thoroughly enjoying using MoI.



Martin (2).

Hi Martin,

> Sorry Michael, but I couldn't follow this bit:- "You can get the basics of it right now by using
> Edit > Separate on the face, then doing a shell, then deleting the bottom face of the shell and
> then joining it back in." I'm probably having a blonde moment though, but thoroughly
> enjoying using MoI.

Those are just the steps you can do currently to get the same result as what I think you're looking for with the "zero width" inset.

Step 1 - select the face of the solid that you wanted to do the inset on.

Step 2 - run Edit > Separate to break that face off from the main object and make it into its own separate individual surface. This is because the Shell command in the next step operates differently depending on whether you have an unjoined individual surface selected or whether you have a face selected that is joined to other things.

Step 3 - Run Construct > Offset > Shell on the separated surface. When run on a surface shell thickens a surface into a slab.

So now at this point you basically have all the pieces that you were looking for, the only problem is that the shelled surface is a solid with top and bottom caps, so in order to finish it up you will want to delete the bottom face of this solid slab piece and then with the bottom open you can join the main body and the thickened slab piece together again.

In order to get at the bottom face of the slab you will probably want to hide the main piece temporarily. One quick way to do that is by using the "isolate" functionality - select the slab and right-click on the Hide button. Doing a right-click does an "Isolate" operation which keeps the selected object and instead hides everything else. Then when you're done working on that object, do second right-click on the Hide button and it will restore object visibility to the previous state before you did the initial Isolate.

Hope this helps, let me know if it's still not clear.

- Michael

Hi Michael.

After following your mini tutorial, it's all clear now.
I like the 'isolate' feature for keeping the work flowing smoothly.


Thanks for your help.



Martin. (2)

Hi Martin, so after a whole bunch of testing and debugging I was finally able to track down the bug that was making your original 1mm inset here fail, it was a bug in the latest update to the geometry library.

So I've got that fixed now so the next v3 beta will be able to do that inset again ok.

Thanks for posting the file!

- Michael

Brilliant!

You seem to work very hard on making MoI as good as it can possibly be, so thanks very much for that.


Martin (2).

Michael.

I'm using the November 2012 release here.

If you extrude the conrod.3dm to (say) 20mm and do an Inset on the top face with the Thickness at 2mm, Direction = inwards, and the other two options unchecked, then no inset happens (for me).

Swapping the Direction setting or ticking the Use separate height feature seems to clear the problem - even if these options are then subsequently reverted.

Just to mention that when I tried Inset for the very first time on this beta, I saw a surface leak through the large hole of the conrod file, but I haven't seen that happen since.


Thanks for all your hard work.

Martin (2).

That's a strange one Martin, it's quite random, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't. I did find if inset fails, hit cancel, leave top face selected, hit inset again and it works.

Something for Michael to investigate.

-

Yes, it is Danny, but I have a supernatural ability to find these things you know :-)


Martin (2)

:) I don't know if having a supernatural ability in finding problems is a good thing or bad thing ;)

-

Errr... I'll ask the Mrs when she gets home ;-)


Martin (2).

Hi Martin,

Was this inset problem fixed with the V3 Nov 6th release.

Danny.

Danny.

I'm still not finding it 100% reliable (random fails) unless I enter both the Thickness and the Height, in which case my experience is that everything works fine and the tool is perfectly usable. This is with the 2nd version of the Nov 2012 beta - the one with the repaired .sat and .step imports/exports.


Martin (2).

Hi Martin, I'm able to reproduce the occasional inconsistent behavior, so there's definitely still some other bug lurking around in there somewhere, sometimes this kind of sporadic failure can be due to bugs using uninitialized memory.

I'll continue to dig into it and see if I can track down this other bug too, it can be hard to get to the bottom of things that don't reproduce reliably though but I'll try.

- Michael

And hey, at least it works some of the time now, that's some amount of progress since in the last beta it was broken all the time... ;)

- Michael

Hi Michael...

...I think we all know that you won't be able to rest until you've got to the bottom of it :-)



Martin (2).

Hi Martin, so I think I've finally gotten to the bottom of what was going wrong with the Inset case that you posted in this thread - it had to do with a bug in the "test for coincidence between closed curves" mechanism in the geometry library.

I've got it fixed for the next v3 beta and it looks like this case that was behaving with sporadic errors should work properly after that.

Thanks for posting the example file.

- Michael

Nice one, Michael!

Thank you very much - I hope it didn't take too much time to find + fix.


Cheers.
Martin (2).