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!

Very impressive Michael!!
Any news on the continuity options and/or match command?

Hi niko,

> Any news on the continuity options and/or match command?

Nope, no news on those, I've been working on the stuff shown here.

- 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?

Not I, yet :) but they look like they should be helpful :)

thinking about it, I would be very happy with the n-sided patch, can see a lot of use for that :)

Hi steve,

> Not I, yet :) but they look like they should be helpful :)

Do you have a particular goal in mind for where they'd be helpful?

- Michael

Hi

I have one question please:

Is it possible to create and use fallofs in moi just like in Cg tools? These would be very cool to deform and create fast concepts.

Thanks

This looks fantastic Michael G.! When might we be able to test fly this? :-)

Michael T.

Hi Paulo,

> Is it possible to create and use fallofs in moi just like in Cg tools? These would be
> very cool to deform and create fast concepts.

Do you have an example to show what you are asking about?

There are 2 new deformation tools in v3 currently - Transform > Deform > Flow and Twist.

- Michael

Hi Michael T.

> When might we be able to test fly this? :-)

In the next beta. I'm still in progress working on it right now though.

- Michael

Hi Michael

Here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=76r95S3d6K8

and here :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doYOlTgd8ms

I guess this might be possible if we can have control points in polisurfaces.....maybe

What do you think Michael?? I never saw any cad package with this and I think this would be the perfect addition to moi since these are perfect for fast modeling and design concepts.

Hi Paulo, for that kind of sculpting-like approach I'd recommend using a polygon modeling program just like in those videos - just generally overall a polygon modeler is more suited to that kind of modeling technique, both in toolset and in the model structure itself.

NURBS modeling like MoI is based on is not good for that kind of modeling approach, NURBS are much stronger in generating things from profile curves rather than that kind of "point sculpting" type method.


> and I think this would be the perfect addition to moi since these are
> perfect for fast modeling and design concepts.

It actually takes a quite high level of practice and skill to get proficient in sculpting type workflows, so in a certain sense it's actually not very fast unless you have spent a long time practicing the techniques.

If you do want to try some of those techniques on NURBS models you might try the tools in ViaCAD that steve was mentioning back here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5721.26

In general though that kind of point sculpting mechanism is a very different approach than the "draw profile curves" based approach that MoI is focused on using, so I don't really anticipate including something like that anytime soon, it's just not a very natural fit with MoI's primary modeling strategy.

Different programs and technologies put emphasis on different kinds of techniques - if you want to do point manipulation/sculpting with dropoffs, polygon modelers put a large emphasis on that kind of technique so you would want to use one of them for that.


Someday in the future I would like to try to incorporate polygon modeling tools inside of MoI as well, but that's a long ways off because it requires a very different toolset. And also there are several different polygon modeling tools out there already so that's another reason why it hasn't been a primary focus also.


- Michael

Hello,

There is control point modeling as a feature of the VSR Shape Modeling plugin for Rhino. I find that it works well. The downside is that the VSR shape plugin is twice the cost of Rhino, and over four times the cost of MoI. That said I think it is one of the best plugins I've seen for the Rhino platform in terms of features and the quality you can achieve without being an expert at surfacing. I'm confident MoI will get to that point, and actually greatly prefer the MoI way of working, it's just a matter of time. You might also want to check out Clayoo for Rhino. I've been kicking around the idea that it might be a good addition to the toolbox, and it looks like a T-Splines alternative assuming you have Rhino.

Indeed :)

I did play with Clayoo and on my machine it slowed down very quickly.

Win 7 pro, 64bit
64 bit Rhino
8GB ram
7200 RPM harddrives.

TSpline, from my messing around, maintained good performance through pretty complex modifications. Clayoo is pretty cool too but it seemed to be more of a CPU hog.

>Hi steve,

>> Not I, yet :) but they look like they should be helpful :)

>Do you have a particular goal in mind for where they'd be helpful?

>- Michael

I was thinking that they might help with organic modelling without having to resort to mesh tools.

Not that I know anything about about how moi works :).

Can someone tell me about T-Splines, seen plenty of videos and results and a lot of rhino users love them,
Are they a mesh tool? Or are they some sort of advance surface type?