Hi Richard,

> I was wondering if you are developing an option to extrude to surface.

Can you explain this in a little bit more detail? One thing I was thinking of adding in eventually (after some other stuff such as arrays, image backgrounds, etc are done) was an option for having extrude to create a protrusion from an existing surface and have it automatically unioned to the main object. But this would be the equivalent of doing a boolean union on the result of a surface extrusion. You're mentioning boolean subtraction so I think you may be asking about something slightly different.


> I hope this is not a redundant post as I want to add new suggestions and not
> beat a dead horse so to speak :)

Don't be afraid to speak up and offer suggestions and request new features. Sometimes it helps me gauge things when I see a lot of people asking for stuff, that can help me prioritize. Please don't get discouraged if I mention that something may take a while, everything can't get done all at once! :)


> Thanks again for this wonderful program and the new beta works fantastically with the n-gon export.

Thank you! If you're using the n-gon export, I'd love to see some wireframe snapshots, I haven't really had a chance to see many results of that yet.

- Michael

Hi Michael,
Sorry for the delay in a reply but I wanted to get some images together to better illustrate what I mean.

The current way:
Step 1
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/29/step1ld5.jpg

Step 2
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/8475/step2qt9.jpg

Step 3
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/1/step3xs6.jpg

Step 4
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/3950/step4bk7.jpg

Step 5
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/3596/step5azk0.jpg


And the way I was talking about:

Step 1-3
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/3844/step1adz9.jpg

And final result
http://img19.imageshack.us/img19/818/step5ib6.jpg

I hope this is understandable :)
I am better at images than trying to communicate through words.

Hi Richard, thank you for making those images, that totally clarifies it.

I had been thinking about adding this functionality into Trim (or maybe more appropriately a boolean) instead of Extrude, though.

The way it would work is in your step 3, instead of doing an extrusion there you could do a trim or boolean of the box with the curve, and there would be an option to leave the imprint of the extruded trimming curve on to the box. Right now you can do the trim, but it only cuts the box and does not leave the extrusion of the trimming curve itself behind, that's what would change.

This would end up being a little bit more general purpose than doing a specialized extrude, because a specialized extrude method would have problems with some shapes, such as imagine if your trimming curve in step #3 was a circle - you can't do a clean extrusion of a circle if the circle is vertically aligned...

So what would you think of that method?

- Michael

Hi Michael

Thanks for the reply. If I understand correctly what you purpose sounds more dynamic that what I was showing. I was looking at it strictly from a CAD point of view as this is one of the features I used in CATIA.

I think the way you plan on adding this feature eliminates even more steps that what I had shown.

Keep up the great work :) And thanks.