Hi,

It could be neat to have an 'edit' mode for solid objects, giving access to the control curves.
In normal mode root curves wouldn't be accessible, thus preventing accidental deletion and making less objects in the workplace.

Ideally the curve could stay associated with solid objects, they could be moved, scaled an rotated without losing master curves.

A gizmo could manipulate extrusion heights.


Also, a feature that would make complex shapes editing easier: "align view to profile curve" feature. The perspective viewport could temporarily turn orthogonal and permit easy adjustment of profiles without loosing the profile 'z' alignment.

Regards,

Marc

Hi Marc - re: Edit mode - what would you expect to happen if 2 solids have been constructed using the same curve as input?

For example if you create 2 different lofts that have a curve in common - what would happen then if you moved one of the lofts and it took the input curve along with with it? Should the other Loft be recalculated to go through the moved curve? Should the input curve be cloned and become 2 different curves?

There are some other kind of complications as well - like what if the generator curves were edge curves from a different solid...

Another scenario I kind of worry about is something like this - say you have an outline curve that you extrude up into a solid. Now you want to keep this solid, but also make some changes to the outline curve and create a second new solid from it. So right now you can do this quite easily by just dragging the current solid off to the side somewhere which uncovers your original curves, make the edits, and repeat the extrude to make a second shape. If the original curves were automatically bundled with the solid and moved off to the side with it, some pretty simple situations like this have the potential to get somewhat confusing... That's one reason why I worry about doing too many kinds of fully "automatic" type operations like this.

I'll think about it some more though and see what might be possible - maybe once I have some kind of grouping type functionality it could be used to enable this kind of scenario.

- Michael

Hi Micheal,

I guess it's more complicated than I initially thought. :-)
This would indeed limit workflows and create unnecessary loose ends.

Maybe with a layer system this kind of management could be done.
Profiles could go on a special layer and wouldn't be mistaken from normal curves.

Regards,

Marc

i agree with Mchael on this issue. The suggestion of hiding the input objects is exactly what i do not like in other programs such as Amapi and Hexagon. Then how can you reference one input object to many different ouput objects? If you want to see what is more interesting for history, take a look at SolidThinking. They have a full history tree, while the objects remain individually but also linked through the tree of all objects which used it as input...

jonah

Hi Marc, yeah I think there is some potential to make this work through a kind of layer or grouping type system.

If you could assign the input curves to be grouped with the output object, and therefore move together with them when you repositioned the object, but have them hidden, then it seems like that would have all the ingredients in place.

I'll try to consider this scenario when I work on grouping for v2. Sometimes grouping with hidden objects can be tricky itself though.

- Michael