Amazing work, this will be quite useful!

Marc

BLESS YOU MICHAEL!!!!

=-D

May you be further inspired.
(can't wait)

Looks magic !
Thanks a lot for showing us the progress !

I guess Michael has already come across the problem where the surfaces adjoining the hole do not have continuity. I've run in to this problem a lot in Solidworks, which forces G0 continuity in a lot of cases.

Hi Danny,

> You mentioning a bulge factor type slider reminded me of this thread http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=2915.4
> maybe difficult for the n-sided patch however any chance seeing it with Blend?

Yeah I am planning on overhauling Blend soon too, probably not for this very next beta but the one after. I want to do various tune-ups and one thing I want to try is being able to have separate bulge factors for each side rather than just one combined one.

- Michael

Hi Kaël,

> What is the name of the command ? This is great!

I think it will probably be called NSided.

- Michael

Hi Steve,

> I guess Michael has already come across the problem where the surfaces adjoining the
> hole do not have continuity. I've run in to this problem a lot in Solidworks, which forces
> G0 continuity in a lot of cases.

Right now I do still have a general continuity problem that I'm still working on - there is a small area right in the corners of the wedges where they are often G0 instead of G1 but I still have some things to try to hopefully eliminate or at least reduce that.

But also if the surfaces around the hole are themselves not G1 to each other (like for example if you have a simple box with one face missing and then try to fill that in), then I don't expect the blend will be G1 in that corner area either. Is that the kind of thing that you're talking about here? I'm not sure that it's actually possible to have a G1 blend in the corner in cases like that, you're basically trying to make a surface that has 2 different surface normals at one single spot. It could be possible to try to make the blend be G1 itself with using an averaged normal maybe but then the blend will be smooth itself but instead not be G1 to the neighboring surface.

- Michael

Hi Steve, one thing that I've experimented a little bit for the sharply meeting surfaces case is to put in little corner blends like this with poles at the corner spots:



Then that leaves the rest of the area with only G1 meeting surfaces to be patched:




If you want a smooth blend surface fitting into a sharp corner, probably it's going to need that kind of surface with a pole in it (like the tip of a cone) to get that.

But this has some problems - in general the more little surfaces that are used will tend to leave evidence of their construction in the final shape.

There may be some possibilities with an automated blend using that method though, but I'm not sure if I will be getting to that level yet with this current pass.

- Michael

nice stuff Michael.

for now, I move over too viacad to use the tangent cover function to fill holes :)
, tick that off my wish list :)

I wonder if some sort of inflate surface function would help with a lot of the organic type modeling?

Hi Steve,

> I wonder if some sort of inflate surface function would help with a lot of the
> organic type modeling?

Could you describe a bit about what inflate surface would do?

- Michael

All examples shown are 4,6,12...
does this function works also for 5,7,9... ,

Hi Pilou, at the moment it's any number of sides 3 or greater.

- Michael

Hi,

Time or date for the next beta ?

Thanks
Marco

Hi Marco, I don't know any specific date yet, I still have some work left to do on it.

- Michael

> Could you describe a bit about what inflate surface would do?

- Michael


Michael.

I've lifted this from the Deform Face tool Help facility (Pressure, Point and Curve Deform) in ViaCAD Pro v8 and made it into a very short video which can be paused if needed.

http://screencast.com/t/FHRteGH0pE8L
 

Martin (2).

Look at that!

Star method, with "an added twist".... :o

It must be crazy inside your head. Drive a normal man nuts!

The plot thickens.

Nice work Michael.

Hi Martin,

> I've lifted this from the Deform Face tool Help facility (Pressure, Point and Curve Deform) in ViaCAD
> Pro v8 and made it into a very short video which can be paused if needed.

Those are interesting but also a bit weird too - if you wanted a bulging surface in that area why would you start out with a totally flat plane instead of actually constructing a curved surface by sweeps or some other construction technique?

Have you yourself ever had occasion to use those tools in ViaCAD pro for a particular project?


At any rate, the current hole filling mechanism that I'm using is a pretty separate thing from that.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

those new features looks pretty awesome!

Best regards
Stefan

Hi Burr,

> Star method, with "an added twist".... :o

Yeah usually the star method divides each edge in half and then puts in 4-sided surfaces rather than 3 sided ones like I've done here.

I kind of liked doing the 3-sided ones since it does not need to divide any edges up and I think it keeps the surfaces a little easier to control. But I still may experiment with the other method some too.


The good thing about the star method in general is that it's much easier to get the results to join to the generating edges. The difficulty with the "one big warped and trimmed surface" method is getting the surface to actually pass through all edges at a tight enough tolerance so that it will join. Often times for example the output of the Patch command in Rhino will not join with the the generating edges.

- Michael

Wow, I can hardly wait to use those features! Excellent!