Hi Will,

>>Well I tried for example drawing a circle for the profile, I offset the circle to make a smaller one (inner diameter)
>>- I selected both circles, executed the sweep command and then selected my squiggly line
>>- only the outer diameter circle was used for the sweep...

No, both circles were used for sweeping!



I agree it would be fantastic if MoI was able to handle this kind of sweeping as well. Brian mentioned one viable way - sweeping a planar surface. However I guess it is not impossible to identify this as a special case and do sweeping properly in order we can get a tubular shape:
-both curves are planar
-both curves are lying on the same plane
-one of them is completely inside the other

What do you feel about it, Michael?


edit: And generally, if there was more than two rails selected, MoI would sweep a profile(s) along each rail individually. It would allow "handling a larger number of curves at once" :)


Petr

Hi, Tyglik, I guess I didn't notice the change in diameter - I was expect more of what Pipe does however as you (and Brian) mentioned, having the inner diameter form the "thickness" of the wall of the pipe (or in my wish) duct...

Being able to have Pipe with a custom profile and a scaling curve would be the ultimate - I'd stay at home for the day to celebrate! :-p

-Will

Michael,

You are terrific! thanks this is fantastic, I am amazed with your support and generosity of spirit. It is inspiring I know it is a business, however the human compassionate component you bring to this forum is awesome. I am happy to have discovered Moi. I bought it within the first week of release with no regrets :)

Fan for life.

Great work Michael on that script :) i haven't tried it yet but i will. Perhaps you should code into Moi's core directly, and then toss in a couple of extra things in it.

/ Magnus

Hi Will,

> select your curve for it to follow and you get a nice inner diameter
> parameter for free that allows you to create a shell for your extrusion.

The tricky part is that not every curve has a diameter value associated with it.

For example, what would you say is "diameter" of this curve:




> Well I tried for example drawing a circle for the profile, I offset the
> circle to make a smaller one (inner diameter) - I selected both
> circles, executed the sweep command and then selected my
> squiggly line - only the outer diameter circle was used for the sweep...

To get this kind of a thing with sweep, you would actually do 2 different steps - first sweep with just the outer circle and turn the "Cap ends" option off so that it has open ends. Then select your open tube and run Construct / Shell to thicken it.

For example:

Sweep:



Then Shell:




The "radius" based UI of Pipe does not really coordinate well with a custom outline since a custom outline needs a thickness and possibly a directional flip option and not any of the inner/outer radius values that Pipe uses. It basically needs a completely separate UI for it.

But it is still possible to create such things, just not with this new Pipe command though - Pipe's UI is focused on circular pipes.

- Michael

Hi Michael, well to answer your first question the diameter would have to be small enough to fit though the section where the curves are the closest - I get your point but I certainly wouldn't be making piping and ducting with a shape like that...


Thanks for the refresher on sweep, yes, sweep and shell together does do what I requested for Pipe, not to mention a scaling curve with sweep would give even more shape variety over Pipe by itself...

My goal is to create some nurnies for fusionThing w/Cinema 4D...
( http://www.lotsofpixels.com/fusionThing/#detai )

It's just you whip'd Pipe together so fast, I was hoping it was easy to also add an option for an arbitrarily shaped profile curve...

-Will

Okay, but I see that shell doesn't handle sweeps with varying thickness?

-Will

Hi Will,

> Okay, but I see that shell doesn't handle sweeps with varying thickness?

It should if the conditions allow it - here's an example:




But if you ask for a shell thickness where there is not room to allow that much thickness without the offset folding over top of itself, then you will run into problems... I think that's what you've got happening there, you probably need to use a smaller thickness to get a clean offset.

Here is an illustration of the problem:



The above was taken from the documetation on Fillet - trying to perform a fillet of too large a radius around a sharp corner is basically the same problem as asking for too large of a shell thickness where the size or curvature of the surface does not allow for that size.

If you want to post your .3dm model file, I can examine it to verify that this is the problem or not.

If you try a smaller thickness you'll probably see it work ok though.

- Michael

Hi Will,

> Hi Michael, well to answer your first question the diameter
> would have to be small enough to fit though the section
> where the curves are the closest -

Well, it is really tough to try and come up with a definition that works in all cases.

Like with this curve here:



If the diameter is the part where pieces of the curve are closest together, does that mean that the diameter is located in the little bottom part of this curve?


> I get your point but I certainly wouldn't be making piping and
> ducting with a shape like that...

Well, the tough thing is that once you start taking in generic curve input, I have to try to consider what to do when given curves like that.

I think that generally to make it work would require focusing on a thickness type value instead of a radius/diameter type value. It's kind of a different set of UI than what Pipe does right now with radius values.

- Michael

Will
If this is accepted, this pdf may help in working out methods in MoI to create Greebles/Nurnies.
Brian

Techniques and tutorials are always appreciated, thanks Brian!

This will definitely come in handy. I just want to focus on fusionThing for a bit cause I've had it for a while and I need to finally get my head around it and become comfortable with using it...

-Will

Hi Pilou,

> Maybe a factor of reduction from start to end?

How about the ability to specify a different radius at the end, that would probably fit more easily with this UI.

I'll see if I can cook up a different version that does that a bit later.

- Michael

Hi Petr,

> -both curves are planar
> -both curves are lying on the same plane
> -one of them is completely inside the other
>
> What do you feel about it, Michael?

Definitely a good idea! Maybe something that is used only for auto-place mode?

It probably is not too difficult to achieve, I already have a mechanism for determining contained planar regions used for Extrude and Planar.


> edit: And generally, if there was more than two rails selected, MoI
> would sweep a profile(s) along each rail individually. It would allow
> "handling a larger number of curves at once" :)

Yup, I was thinking about this one a bit too. It's slightly odd in that there is an exception for 2 curves being the 2-rail sweep instead... But it seems practical enough, I mean if you only have 2 one-rail sweeps to build, that is not such a big problem to repeat manually.

Added to the wishlist.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

>>Maybe something that is used only for auto-place mode?

I think so. Anyway, is there any snag in it to use it for sweeping without auto-place mode?


Will it work in case of multiple pair-of-profiles? (top part of the image below)



And will the resulting objects be editable using history mechanism or it will break a history on the object like custom command Pipe does?

Petr

Hi Petr,

> Anyway, is there any snag in it to use it for sweeping without auto-place mode?

Just possibly some extra work to set up non-auto-place mode since they go through somewhat separate code paths. But maybe with a bit of re-arranging it would not be a problem to enable it for both types.


> Will it work in case of multiple pair-of-profiles? (top part of the image below)

Yup, I don't see any problem with that. If you use a pair of profiles in one spot, then you'll have to use pairs throughout though.

Also if you use multiple proflies I think you'll only be able to have one hole inside of them. With a single profile multiple holes would work (like imagine a circle with 3 small circles inside of it as holes), but with multiple profiles it will be hard to figure out how to match things up.


> And will the resulting objects be editable using history mechanism or
> it will break a history on the object like custom command Pipe does?

It should work fine with history.

- Michael

Hi Pilou,

> Maybe a factor of reduction from start to end?

Hi Pilou, give the attached new version a try. The command for this one is Pipe2, you can rename the files if you want it to replace the previous Pipe command instead.

This one allows you to specify different outer and inner radius values which get applied to the end of the sweep.

So for example:



This version doesn't automatically update the pipes when you enter values in, you need to push the Update button to see your changes take effect for this version. This is so you can more easily input multiple values, because Pipe does not have the same kind of interruptability that regular commands have.

- Michael

This is the famous "This is not a pipe" by Magritte :)
Bravo!


PS What append when the angle of the curve is too compound / radius?

> PS What append when the angle of the curve is too compound / radius?

It formats your hard drive.... So be careful not to do that! ;)

- Michael

> PS What append when the angle of the curve is too compound / radius?

But seriously this time - it should actually create a surface in these cases, but the surface will be messy and have kind of self-intersecting folds in it.

A surface like that won't be suitable for many other operations on it that involve calculating intersections on the surface, such as booleans or filleting.

It usually can be exported, but of course the result will also be kind of messy but possibly some times that may be ok depending on what you are doing.

So generally those types of things should be avoided, except in a special case where you are only going to export the surface without further operations on it, and you don't mind the messy polygon arrangement either.

- Michael

So in this case the script can't alert? And say "Auto-intersection will be arrive: are you sure to make it" Y / N