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

Hi Marc,

> I imagine it will work with 2d stuff also?

No, not currently - the one that I have right now only targets trimming loops of edges on surfaces like in the example above.

- Michael

So extrude a little the 2D drawing and make the loop ;)

Perfect! I didn't doubt you'd do this well and it would work as it says it should, but I've dealt with Autodesk long enough to know that I should always ask that a logical extension of behavior actually works or not.

Hi Michael...

Below is just for your reference, maybe for better MoI in the future :) :



MoI is still to young :)
We believe one day MoI will have another easy to use and rich tools set.

Hi Anis, unfortunately I don't speak French so that's actually not a particularly good reference for me.

But probably if you need a whole lot of special Fillet functions, something like SolidWorks will be a better tool for that instead of MoI, they just have a lot more focus and specialization in that area.

If you have an example of an actual model that you were working on in MoI where it would have been nice to have some particular selection tool to help you, then please post that model and a description of what you would like it to do, because that is a much better example for me to work off of and use for testing.

I cannot actually test a video, I need to have a model file to load into MoI to be able to actually test new selection methods on it.

- Michael

Hi Michael.....

Today I am not have special case / issue with selection or fillet in MoI.
I just want to give you some idea for selection method by watching video from youtube.

Attached is file that you can use to test.

Thanks !

Hi Anis, thanks for posting the model.

But I also need to know what it is that you wish to do with the model before I could actually test something.

What particular selection task are you trying to optimize in this model?

The new select loop mechanism does work on various parts of this model as well, here is a demo:




> I just want to give you some idea for selection method by
> watching video from youtube.

I'm much more focused on solving problems that MoI users are running into while modeling with MoI than just trying to copy stuff from other software in a video.

It is just not generally a major focus to try and make MoI an exact copy of some other program just for the sake of being the same...

Of course if you are running into a problem with MoI and a video helps to show a solution to your problem, that is more directly to the point. But I need to know more information about your problem to understand that case.

- Michael

Hello Michael
Funny I understand the "English" commentary :)
This was just a Loop selection Manager with case conditions for edges and corners for fillets
(conditions try to make all possible cases)
if you are interested I can detail conditions but seems you know yet all that ;)

Difference with the actual Moi Loop Selection is that you make just "one click selection" + condition
Can be an advantage...or not when you want just a part selection ;)