Sure. I'm an idiot and didn't save it so I re-made it. Still has the same issues.

Hi duke...

Below for the first question :

>Problem C:
>Howcome I can't fillet this?

Try smaller numbers. A fillet would fail if say the part is 1 inch and you try to fillet all sides .5. Not enough room. Take into account the size of the object then try a smaller number. Start with .02 or something.

Post back, or a file if needed.

Burr

>Problem B:

Duke. A more technical answer can come from Michael but you may have to wait while he is at siggraph. I would say those are not curves and wont show up in any kind of render of the model. I think they are construction seams. They get created by how things are built and sliced up.

Just a note as I read your construction methods. maybe try a little different to get a result you want. Draw your box as a solid then boolean diff the holes, then fillet what your after.

Here's a file to look at. Post a file if you're after something different.

Burr

Thanks for the reply. For that first example, I was hoping for a few less clicks/a similar workflow to sketchup or form-z as you can see at 1:23 here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XspVX7vxIm4

I mean if I bring in a floorplan consisting of alot of curves, I just want to be able to go in and start extruding.

Yes Moi does actually do the 2d curve extrusion as you want with floor plans. There is one small difference with it than the formz example you provided and thats that MoI doesnt "Automatically" determine a full curve based on the others it touches. For instance, draw your big square, then the smaller square would have to be drawn as a full square also, not just 2 lines. This can be done with the corner to corner or 3 points options. Then these can be extruded and added or subtracted as you want.

If you had an existing floor plan drawing and you wanted to do the same thing in MoI, you would have to do a "trim" with the segments to define your squares or objects you want to extrude first. a few more clicks than formz or scetchup.

I'll post some examples in a bit.

Burr

Actually, Anis's example above is the one I am refering to.

Good luck.
Burr

Hi Duke, just wanted to add a comment for your question #1 -

> I know how I'd do this in a poly-modeller, and in sketchup i'd just draw
> the main square then draw the other two lines and extrude it, but how do
> I do this in MoI? I want to grab the smaller box and extrude it and have
> everything be one piece.

In SketchUp when you draw in those lines, they kind of automatically modify the existing shape to divide it up into different regions.

MoI does not work like that - when you drew in those 2 lines in MoI, you get 2 new line objects and they are not merged with the existing rectangle. That is the big difference.

There are a few different ways you can get what you want - it looks like you want some kind of shape with a large rectangle and a kind of small rectangle feature - to do this in MoI you would probably draw 2 rectangles and then extrude each of those rectangles.

So to get the smaller rectangle shape in MoI, draw it as a rectangle instead of drawing 2 lines in there.


I'm not quite sure what exactly you want for the final result here, do you want the small rectangle to be punched out further from the larger rectangle? Probably I would do that in some separate steps then, draw the big rectangle, punch it out with extrude, then draw the small rectangle, punch it out with extrude and use boolean union to fuse those 2 boxes together.

- Michael

Hi Duke,

> Problem B:
>
> I made a base shape, filleted the edges and extrudes the top face
> up. I then did a boolean->union but was left with these 4 useless
> curves. How do I delete them to keep things clean?

Those are edge curves, they are in there due to the way you built the model out of smaller pieces which were then combined together.

MoI will try to glue joined planes together into larger single planes when this happens, but it will not currently do that to other kinds of surfaces, that is why the planar sides got "healed" into a single surface but not the rounded fillets.

Generally it is a better idea to put fillets on last after you have done other things like adjusting the heights of objects, you're getting those extra edges in this case because you've got the fillets on earlier than the height adjustment.

Those extra edges are not really causing a major problem in this case, there isn't any really easy way to get rid of them, it is possible to do it by deleting those fillets and doing some surface modeling to create a new longer single-surface fillet piece in there instead and then join it in, but it probably isn't worth the effort.

I do want to improve the history function of MoI in the future, when that gets better adjusting the history of the extrusion height will be the preferred way to alter heights rather than gluing small chunks together like you did in this case.

- Michael

Hi Duke,

> Problem C:
>
> Howcome I can't fillet this?

As Burr mentioned, probably you're requesting a radius that will not fit in the given space.

Using the model moi_testingStuff_01.3dm that you posted earlier, you can fillet there up to about a radius of 0.9 which looks like this:



You can see there that if you go very much larger than 0.9 the pieces are going to start to run into each other, there isn't enough room to fit a full fillet in there. You didn't mention what radius you were using, but was it possibly a radius of 1.0 ? That would be too large.

It is often surprising how much space fillets take up, if you don't get a result try going down to smaller sizes like 0.5, 0.1, 0.001 and see what those look like.

- Michael

Hi Duke,

> Thanks for the reply. For that first example, I was hoping for a few less
> clicks/a similar workflow to sketchup or form-z as you can see at 1:23
> here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XspVX7vxIm4

MoI is not currently super-duper optimized for doing this kind of block modeling...

It is something that I would like to tune up in the future though, I think with MoI's toolset there is a good possibility of adding more functions to the Extrude command so that it would be able to add or remove material directly built into the extrude.

Currently you do have to do things like do the extrude and then do the boolean after you have done the extrude. It's not a particularly big deal if you are doing simple things but yes it would be nice to be more streamlined if you have a lot of them to do.

It hasn't really been a big priority to make that super efficient yet in MoI partly because I kind of figure that if you are doing a whole bunch of blocky extruded architectural shapes, that SketchUp is a highly tuned tool which is focused almost exclusively on doing nothing but that kind of thing, so why not use the right tool for the job instead of MoI for that kind of a thing?

But that's just the explanation for the current priorities, I do expect to improve this area in the future.

Usually people don't focus on using MoI as a replacement for SketchUp to do SketchUp-like things, rather they use MoI to do things like curved objects which are not really feasible to do in SketchUp's kind of block-based operations...

- Michael

Fair enough, although the reason I was looking at it was for just that - a "better" sketchup. I deal with alot of blocks, but our architects are also very fond of curves inter-mingling with said blocks, which sketchup isn't so hot at.

Hi Duke, if you are interested in curvy parts, then certainly it is worthwhile to keep exploring MoI.

I mean despite MoI not being as fully optimized as SketchUp for blocky type stuff, I think it is very fair to say that MoI does handle blocky stuff better than SketchUp handles curvy stuff.

It will take a bit getting used to, like drawing 2 nested rectangles instead of one rectangle and then interior lines.

The blocky handling in MoI means you have to do like an extra step, not really that you can't get the job done at all...

But I mean what you are basically asking for is a program that does everything that other specialty programs do equally as well but also none of the specialty program's weaknesses.... I mean I can understand why you would want that but it is a pretty tall order, you may have to kind of adjust your expectations a bit there, especially when it is relatively early on in MoI's life cycle. I mean MoI version 1.0 was just released this year, SketchUp is in version 6.0 ...

Especially early on in MoI's life I have actually tended to try and make it useful for doing different styles of things than existing programs, the idea there is that it then gives you a useful extra tool to do new things, rather than just trying to do the same things that can already be done very well elsewhere. This will kind of change a bit as MoI matures some more.

- Michael

Hi Duke, one other thing that I should mention, you may be interested in several of the new things for v2, there is a summary of the new stuff so far here: http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/doc/V2releasenotes.html .

That includes several things of interest to architects, such as Feet & inches units (for the US), and SAT format export to enable exporting curved surface data into Revit.

Also some of the new drawing tools that let you draw directly on surfaces, similar to SketchUp in some aspects.

- Michael

Hi Anis,

Which GIF animation program do you use?

I am using a demo of Ulead GIF Animator 5,
but the image quality is poor

I know GIF aren't the best,but i am impressed
by your examples

He's using camtasia I suppose -> http://www.techsmith.com/camtasia.asp

Someone mentioned Jing on the forum I tried it Here in the zip file, I think it's pretty cool.
It's flash format and it's free.

Ok Paq,

Thanks

>Someone mentioned Jing on the forum I tried it Here in the zip file, I think it's pretty cool.
It's flash format and it's free.
~Danny~>

Hey Danny, It is very powerful also. It's Camtasia's Beta testing new idea's. I think moving on to the .net framework 3.

I'm on a w2k box now, so no go. My dev machine has Camtasia, but I do have a machine that could use a recorder and will put this on that. Very cool!

Thanks for the pointer.
Burr

Hi Paolo...

Like PaQ mentioned, I use camtasia 5 now...

-Anis