Quick little demo of the new Transform > Orient command:



It lets you pick a base orientation and then a target orientation, for each orientation pick you place the base point first, and then you can alter the rotation if you want, or right-click if the default rotation is fine.


The other ones like PastePart and ImportPart are similar, but they have the base orientation already set in the file or in the clipboard so you only pick the target orientation for those ones. You might use those variants if you have set a piece up as a kind of library item in a different file or if you put it in the clipboard because you will be pasting several in shortly or something like that.

- Michael

Here's one with Transform > Orient with the "Make copies" option enabled (you can also hold down Ctrl to drop a copy as well):




This would have required quite a lot of fussing with Move + Rotate a bunch of times to do this kind of stuff previously.

- Michael

It wasn't too long ago that I was planning on doing these orientation tools for v3, but I was able to get them into v2 instead.

- Michael

Hi Michael....

Use Edit/Separate...
We still need two more steps to finish the model :

1. Close hollow caps
2. Rejoin surface

Imagine if we have more complex rail, not just rectangle.
Here I am not force you to make everything perfect, this is just my feedback maybe for next version release in the future.... :)

Thanks

Oh Joae, a new beta has been released!! :-D

Thanks for the Xmas present Michael, and thanks for the refresher as to what has been added I also look forward to those orient tools!

-Will

PS - Michael, you wrote previously:
"Also in the next beta the regular Sweep command will be able to handle doing sweeps along multiple rails without needing to install the Pipe plugin.
If you select 3 or more rails, it will just be the equivalent of doing a 1-rail sweep along each of them."

Is that in there as well?

Thanks Michael ...

I just did a quick mitered window frame ... wonderful!

eric

Hi Anis,

> Use Edit/Separate...
> We still need two more steps to finish the model :
>
> 1. Close hollow caps
> 2. Rejoin surface

Yes - but that's not unusual or unintended that you may need to use more than one tool to complete a model.

Using more than one command in combination with each other can help to prevent each command from becoming too complex - if commands end up with dozens and dozens of options in them, they tend to become more difficult to use.

It's a major goal of MoI to not be difficult to use, so that's why I tend to resist adding in options too rapidly when there are other existing ways to produce the result.


If a some industry tended to need that kind of result on complex sweeps often, probably the best way to approach it would be to have a plug-in command that could process the result of a sweep to automate that sequence of separating and solidifying the components.


Also, it's actually easy to be more efficient in the use of the existing tools than what you show in your screenshot - you don't actually need the rejoin step.

Instead of separating the model into completely individual surfaces, you can instead select these 2 sets of faces (with a crossing right-to-left window selection after having selected just 1 face first):



With those pieces selected, you can then use Edit/Separate and the model will separate into 4 pieces instead of into completely individual surfaces, so you get a result like this which is ready to have Planar applied to it:




That's a feature of Separate - if you have a set of face sub-objects selected, Separate will break that collection of faces apart from the main piece but still keep them joined to one another. You can use that to more strategically break off some sub structure of an object without having to do a re-join after.

- Michael

Hi Will,


Yup, that's in this release.

Here's an example - here select the profile shape:



Then run Construct > Sweep, you will then have a prompt that says "Select rails", and the new thing is that you can do a window select at this point to grab all those rail curves in one go, and get this result:




So the only thing to keep in mind is that if you select 2 rails, it will do a 2-rail sweep which is a different kind of surface creation than the 1-rail sweep.

So if you want to do 2 1-rail sweeps, you still need to repeat the 1-rail sweep twice to get that. But if you want to produce 20 of them (or any amount 3+) you can select all 20 path curves with just one sweep command to make that happen.

- Michael

Profils must be entierly planar else some strange sweeping forms can be appear ;)

here an auto-sweep ;)

Hi Pilou, yes your profiles should definitely be planar for the mitering to work.

You can make your rail to be non-planar but not the profiles.

I suppose I should probably detect if the profile is non-planar and not attempt to do mitering in that case since it will mostly just make a mess, I'll add that to my list to look at.

- Michael

yes because when you move the profil after the first process, the update calculate becomes very very long so only Esc can be done if you want a reasonable time !!!!

re: orient

well, i'll be! i just saw on my pc here, an old screenshot i did to ask about this... and now its reality. sweeet!

Cross it off the wish list brother!

Hi Nick,

> well, i'll be! i just saw on my pc here, an old screenshot i did
> to ask about this... and now its reality. sweeet!

How cool is that when your wish becomes a reality ? :)

I think the screenshot you are mentioning is this one ?
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1394.1


> Cross it off the wish list brother!

Crossed off now!

While I was at it, I noticed that several others of your wishes are now reality as well so I crossed some other ones off too:

- Checkbox for hide/show view controls in Options dialog,
(Added in v2 under Options > View > Show view controls)

- Some sort of visual confirmation (non-interrupting flash somewhere, message, something like that...) That a Save, Save As, or Incremental Save has finished successfully.
(Added in the previous v2 beta there is an asterisk * marker that shows up at the end of the current file name in the upper-right area of the window when you have made any changes to the model. When you Save/SaveAs/Incremental Save, the asterisk goes away, you can look for that as a confirmation).

- Inscribed / Circumscribed option for Polygon command.
(That's another new thing in this most recent Dec-19 v2 beta, it's a Circumscribed checkbox option for the Polygon command. Unchecked = inscribed (default) and checked = circumscribed).


- Michael

Hi Michael...

>Instead of separating the model into completely individual surfaces, you can instead select these 2 sets of
>faces (with a crossing right-to-left window selection after having selected just 1 face first):

Yes, this help a lot.... :)

Okay, thanks Michael, I understand now - basically it'll create all your different shapes in on go.

I thought perhaps there was some other kind of generation where the rails were used together - I guess perhaps something like with the scaling rail included - just wasn't sure what you meant about sweeping multiple rails at the same time...

Welp I'm happy! I can go back and revisit a model when I first started using MoI and I tried to do a certain shape with the 1-rail sweep that didn't work.

Of course I could redo it with all the tricks and tips I've learned since then but then what fun is that! :-P


Thanks again Michael for a great update!

-Will

Hi Will, yeah it's kind of like a "batch mode" for one-rail type sweeping.

It doesn't do any kind of new shaping, it's just more convenient for applying the same profile sweep along a whole bunch of paths without having to repeat the sweep command over and over again.

The connection to Pipe is that previously Pipe was the main thing available that would handle doing a batch process for making a lot of tubes.

Pipe still may be useful for some special things since it includes the option to make hollowed out tubes. But also Pipe only is set to make a circular cross-section and not just any cross-section curve like regular Sweep.

But unless you want to make a whole bunch of hollowed out tubes, you probably don't really need Pipe anymore.

- Michael

Still working on the release notes, probably won't have them ready until tomorrow.

- Michael

Actually I was just about to reinstall Pipe2 exactly for the hollowed out functionality.

Thinking further, it would sorta be nice if that inner diameter (width in this case?) was carried forward to the new sweep capabilities.

The one thing I do in addition to piping is adding >ducts< which are usually some rectangular shape or similar. Having an inner diameter now for those would be nice.

I guess I could run the 1-rails with a smaller profile object and subtract from the larger one however...


-Will

Hi Will,

> I guess I could run the 1-rails with a smaller profile object
> and subtract from the larger one however...

That's exactly what the Pipe command does - it is basically a macro for making 2 sweeps and then booleaning the small center one from the large one.

I'm not sure exactly how a width or diameter would work for all cases with sweep, because sweep is not limited to only have a circle or rectangle cross-section, it can have any curve as the cross-section shape including non-planar ones...

In the future I would like to do something to make it possible to select a kind of group of curves for one cross-section, like this for example:



That would be more general purpose than having a single width or diameter parameter.

I have that on my list of stuff to look at for sweep in the future, but I'm not sure exactly when that will happen - definitely not for v2 though.

- Michael

That would be wonderful Michael!

Being able to create a profile like that would allow me to "core out" the inside of my sweeps with any kind of internal shaping - as always, the better way to do things... ;-)

-Will