I tried :)

Hi Pilou,

> so in this case you select a little circle (so circle is the "circle
> box selection" ) and apply a "circular array selection"

There's also a danger with having so many complex selection mechanisms, like "circular array selection", etc... - if there are for example 100 different selection functions, that would certainly be very powerful but very difficult for many users to find the most useful and basic ones within that overwhelming list of highly specialized and complex selection tools.

Turning MoI into a very complex program with huge lists of complex options is something that I'm generally trying to avoid...

- Michael

A popup of an entity list after edges are selected? It could be an overwhelming popup, but in some cases would present:

8 Closed curves .375 Radius
8 arcs .25 Radius
22 line .5 Length
16 lines .25 Length
1 closed curve 36.25 Length

Check, check....Ok.

Filtered selection.

Hi Burr,

> A popup of an entity list after edges are selected? It could
> be an overwhelming popup, but in some cases would present:

Well, I am hoping to keep MoI to be easier to use than a 747 cockpit control panel... ;)

Too many huge lists of things whamming the user in the face is just something I have put a lot of effort into avoiding.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

There is a legacy chaining or looping method that some of us still use that's been with our software since day dot, most don't know it's there because they rely on the current chaining Intelligence which sometimes does do what you mention previously, when there are alternate routes.

The way the legacy chaining or looping works is you pick the the begining of the first edge/curve of the chain string you want, hit the 'chain' icon or keyboard shortcut to let the software know you want to do looping, then pick the end of the last edge/curve you want in your loop selection. I guess it's old school stuff but it works a treat.

Cheers

Hi Danny, so one big question I have about the chaining stuff is should it attempt to make a chain that spans across several different surfaces? Or should it only attempt to chain a set of edges along one single face like in the example earlier in this thread (http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3112.3) ?

I think that doing one along a single face like in the example above is pretty straightforward.

If it is supposed to do more than that, I am going to need a bunch of other examples to understand how it is supposed to work with longer chains that don't necessarily hug just one face.


If I did a method where it stopped and asked you every time there was a potential branching juncture, then it seems like for the case above you would be picking a lot of them, unless there were some additional rules involved like once you have several curves on a single plane keep going in that plane, or stuff like that - those rules are an essential part of how it would work, so I would need to actually know those rules in order to make it work correctly.

I can't just make it "chain stuff automatically" - writing code does not allow for any kind of vagueness, the method of how it works has to be very specifically planned out.

- Michael

Maybe also these selections helpers are more "polygons spirit" than "nurbs spirit" ?

Hi Pilou,

> Maybe also these selections helpers are more
> "polygons spirit" than "nurbs spirit" ?

Well, they're probably more heavily used in polygon modeling but many CAD programs also have some kind of edge chaining method in them as well.

- Michael

My Cad/Cam package does chain selecting. It's pretty worthless in any kind of directional chains as it just kindof "spiders" all over in any which way. It is only viable in one continuous selection with no branching. But I think it is used in the cam side as a "directional thing" more than a speed up the selection process thing. a definate start and end by selection thing. :O

So it seems like the simplest way to do this is by having a method to select all edges of a face's trimming boundary if two consecutive edges of it are already selected.

I've added that in for the next v2 beta.

That will enable setting up a keyboard shortcut to do loop selection like this:



- Michael

Hi Michael,

Looks like this works well, the method is very similar to what I mentioned previously, what happens when you split the top surface in half to produce a seam down the center?

-

Hi Danny,

> what happens when you split the top surface in half to
> produce a seam down the center?

A "trimming loop" is a topological entity that belongs to a face, and this method is basically a shortcut to help with selecting a trimming loop.

So it is oriented towards selecting edges that belong to one particular face.

If you split the top surface into 2 faces, then you will get a loop that goes around one of them like this:





- Michael

Yep, understood and welcomed.

Cheers

THAT is very cool !

Hi Michael,

Will it work for non planar face ?
How about "tangen selection" ?

Hi Anis,

> Will it work for non planar face ?

Yup, it works for selecting all the edges that make up a trimming loop on any face, planar or non-planar.


> How about "tangen selection" ?

It doesn't try to do anything special with tangency, it just grabs all the edges that make up a face's trimming loop.

- Michael

> That's a pretty good possibility... But is this kind of edge loop selection
> intended to only select edges that belong to just one face, or should
> it try to build a chain that possibly crosses multiple faces of the model?

This actually gave me pause while I thought about it. While the idea of crossing multiple surfaces on the model in this discussion isn't going to happen, the idea MIGHT happen elsewhere. Problem was, the only kind of NURBS model that I could think of that would naturally be constructed with a lot of different but well aligned surfaces around some part of it would be organic things like people, animals, trees, and such. The kind of things that MoI isn't really suited to model yet. If and when it is, though, such a loop that crosses surfaces would have to be bound by the tangents between the edges of the loop already chained; meaning that the edge on the next face it wants to follow would only deviate from the average of the tangents by very little. Otherwise, you end up with the problem of it spider-webbing all over the place.

Personally, the solution you have shown seems like the best thing for the way MoI works now. My only question is, does it work if you try to loop multiple faces at the same time? Such as, in this model, you want to select the top and bottom edges, could you select the four edges needed to hint, press loop, and get those correct edges? Or does that end in tears and a crazy selection?

> That will enable setting up a keyboard shortcut to do loop selection like this:

That's awesome!

I imagine it will work with 2d stuff also?

Marc

Well, what can I say! Thanks for all you tech guys for working out a solution. I am sure I can think of a few more good additions.... back soon.

Thanks Michael for your time and effort on this one.

Hi Keris,

> My only question is, does it work if you try to loop
> multiple faces at the same time?

Yeah, it looks through all loops in the entire model, anytime it finds a loop with 2 adjacent edges selected (or only 1 edge if the edge is not a joined edge between 2 surfaces) then all the edges in that loop get selected.


> Such as, in this model, you want to select the top and
> bottom edges, could you select the four edges needed
> to hint, press loop, and get those correct edges?

Yup, that works fine - that's why it only works if you have 2 adjacent edges on a loop selected and not just any 2 edges in it selected.

So for example if you select these edges:



Then when you run select loop it will make this result:



The loop shown here in red:



is not targeted because even though it has 2 edges in it selected, they are not adjacent to one another in the loop.

- Michael