Hi Michael,

Would it be possible for you to "embellish" a Join command so that it would also work like MergeEdge in Rhino?

Some way of manupulating a surface seam would be also useful. I guess the V2's objects property window would be a good spot for this(?).

Petr.

Hi Petr, I've thought about that a little bit but there is kind of a complication - right now you can use Join on surface edges to create a new joined stand-alone curve. This can be kind of useful in certain circumstances, like when you want to grab a set of edges and use them as a sweep rail - pick the edges and then use Join and it is all ready to go. Switching it to doing a MergeEdge type operation instead would interfere with that use.

I have thought a bit about having a separate "Merge" operation in addition to Join that would fuse things together, then at that point it would be more natural to have selected edges fuse together like MergeEdge.

What do you think?

(P.S. - I'm not sure if I have mentioned it before, but you can use Trim on an edge to do the equivalent of SplitEdge).


> I guess the V2's objects property window would be a good spot for this(?).

Yeah, I haven't figured it out exactly yet, but I've been thinking of having a kind of "advanced object edit" menu that would pop up with a bunch of somewhat less frequently used but sometimes useful edit tools like this.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>>right now you can use Join on surface edges to create a new joined stand-alone curve

Yes, I know... I just forgot to take it into consideration :)


>>I have thought a bit about having a separate "Merge" operation

Do you mean the "Merge" operation would combine a separate edges or curves that share the end and also a surfaces which share an edge? There is a couple of another merge-like command in Rhino, so if you grouped all of them into one MoI command (and of course, added some extra one :), it would be very cool!

>>(P.S. - I'm not sure if I have mentioned it before, but you can use Trim on an edge to do the equivalent of SplitEdge).

You did so.


Petr

The other tricky part with modifying Join is that it is one of the commands that just does its work and exits immediately without having any kind of "Adjust options" kind of stage to it.

I suppose it would be possible to change it so that if you did pick edge curves it could have another stage and let you change how it worked (choosing between doing MergeEdge or to produce a joined curve), but it just doesn't seem like that would be very natural.

> Do you mean the "Merge" operation would combine a separate edges or
> curves that share the end and also a surfaces which share an edge?

Yup, what I would imagine at first would be:

If you selected a single curve made up of multiple segments, it would fuse all the segments together into one single segment, automatically smoothing where the old segments used to meet.

If you selected several different curves that touched end to end, it would fuse them all into a new curve made up of a single smooth segment.

If you selected edge curves that touched end to end, it would do MergeEdge. Probably the edges need to be G1 for this to work.

If you selected 2 individual surfaces that touched along a common natural edge, it would fuse them into one single smooth surface.

I guess it would also make sense to merge co-planar surfaces within one solid together into a larger plane, but that actually already happens automatically now most of the time when you do booleans.

Any other ideas for what a Merge command should do?


The only other problem I'm worried about is that Merge sounds kind of similar to Join. I'm not so sure about putting it on the top level UI nearby Join, I might want to kind of stash it a little bit away in that "advanced edit tools" menu or something.

- Michael

>>Any other ideas for what a Merge command should do?

Until now I haven't found out anything so I rely on you to think of something :)

>>The only other problem I'm worried about is that Merge sounds kind of similar to Join [...]
>>I might want to kind of stash it a little bit away in that "advanced edit tools" menu or something extra.

I agree with you about that.
On Rhino newsgroup there was quite a lot of questions like "What is the difference between MERGE and JOIN?", so yes, it might be a problem. Moreover, Merge command even occurs in MoI - Boolean-Merge.

Petr

ps: I have noticed when I click a Show Pts command without pre-selection an object, no command prompt appears...

> ps: I have noticed when I click a Show Pts command without pre-selection
> an object, no command prompt appears...

Hi Petr, I have made a note to fix this up for V2. At the moment I'm trying to avoid making any changes that would cause additional translation work.

- Michael