Hi Gregarious,
I'm actually working on something very similar. There is no "Magnet" type tool in MoI. But I'm about to switch my initial curve. The sine tool will give you to many points to be able to acheive what you are describing. I'm going to re-create my sine with a simple drawing tool, thyen I can show the points and deform it in the 3rd dimension.

The other thing you can look at doing, is creating a surface that has the "Plumping you want/need. with a sweep of a couple of curves, or just extrude a plumped curve, then "project" your sine wave onto that plumped surface. If you know your sine wave is fine at this point, this will be very fast. But if you may require a bit of adjustment down the road, you'll kindof be stuck now with the multitude of points, all plumped and hard to deform. You'de have to revert to before the projection to make an adjustment.


Good luck!

Thanks for your suggestions.. I'll give them a try shortly..( heading out now to pick up some wood ). I'm sure somewhere there's a "metal" forming tool. Being able to deform a surface with the approach of another strikes me as handy but I'm off to the left usually. But this one has been driving me a little nuts. If I didn't have a few hundred cycles to consider, I'd just draw it.. But getting it to look good too in repetition has been challenging..

Hi Greg, there's no tool that lets you collide one curve into another and deform it...

Normally if you want to have a curve take on some portion of another curve's shape you would just trim them with one another and then join in the actual piece of the other curve you want and then possibly fillet them to smooth out where they connect.


But for a collision type thing you could do something like position the other curve how you want it and then use it as a snapping tool to move control points on to it. That may help for your situation.

Here's an example:



But you can kind of see there with the last point being moved that if you do not have many control points in an area where there are transitions between the deformed area and the original, that you will probably get some bad looking results in those spots.

That's more or less why that kind of collision tool is not normally part of a CAD program's toolset, that kind of a thing based just off of control point manipulation is a kind of approximating thing and does not truly give a 100% exact imprint of the shape, just something that resembles it.

Doing something that actually collides the geometry directly rather than just mushing points around would be quite difficult to implement.... Maybe in the future at some point it could be possible but there would be an awful lot of details to work out especially in transition areas. Kind of gives me a headache just to consider it so that is not a good sign about it being very feasible soon... ;)


EDIT - you might also look into sheet metal design programs to see what they do - it's possible that programs that are specialized in sheet metal design could have some tools similar to that but in general I don't think so - I think that they work more by cutting a surface by an outline, moving the cut piece, and then putting in fillets to connect it to the original body rather than trying to keep it all one surface or all one curve like you're talking about... I myself am not really that familiar with sheet metal design though.

- Michael

Hi Greg - also you may be interested in this previous message where jonah has a demo of using Blend + array to make something that resembles a sine wave, but is actually more rounded than a true sine wave.

It sounds like in your case that more rounded result would be better:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1519.39

Something like that where you draw just one cycle of your "plumped" sine wave and then repeat it could be a better way for you to build your result rather than focusing so much on deforming an existing sine wave.

- Michael

Many thanks for your time... :-) I'll look into that post as well. Lately, I've been dealing with CNC software upgrades and their impact on my production of stuff.. But I'm done and back at the rounder "sine" wave problem since it applies to 3/4 of the project..

I've started to investigate metal forming programs as well.. It's sort of a rubber sheet and magnet problem..

But thanks again...and happy holidays..