Hi Michael,


Well, I'm a little confused about this...but it looks like when a solid sphere is drawn in MoI and scaled 2d in a particular way, it changes from a 3 degree object to a 2 degree object, decreasing the number of control points...however, when I saved the sphere and opened it in Rhino, it read as a 2 degree object.

My original point was that if you want to control point edit a sphere into another shape, scaling it 2d also reduces the number of control points, making it less shape-able.

Jesse

Hi Jesse - I see what you mean.

The part that is confusing here is the "automatic deformable points" feature.

This is what makes a degree 2 sphere that is made up of 4 quadrants instead show the control points of a deformable degree 3 surface approximation. The sphere is actually degree 2 the whole time but if you move one of the points, it will get automatically converted into a rebuilt degree 3 surface approximation so that it can be squished smoothly (you have probably already seen the kind of quadrant segmentation that happens if you move the points on a degree 2 surface that has fully multiple knots in it).

This automatic refitting is only active for surfaces of revolution. If you scale a sphere in the direction that its seam is running, it will remain a surface of revolution, but if you scale it along one of the other directions it will no longer be a surface of revolution and won't have the automatic refitting applied to it.

I think it may be possible to me to extend this to work better in the future instead of only working on surfaces of revolution.

- Michael

The basic idea is that if you draw a sphere, I want to keep it as degree 2 if you don't need to mess with its control points since the degree 2 version is a totally precise exact sphere.

But if you want to turn on control points and squish it, you get the points for a rebuilt degree 3 version, but the sphere itself does not get changed to use that degree 3 rebuilt surface until you actually drag one of those points around.

- Michael

Hehe... the "automatic refit with deformable object" feature seems to have a lot of hidden secrets -Petr