Hi Al, v2 is all finished up now so it won't be until v3 that any more new things get added.

I do have a Tapered extrude (extrude with draft angle) on my list of stuff to work on.

In the meantime a combination of Offset + Move + Loft can produce the same kind of result.

Please see this previous post for some details on that:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=941.5

- Michael

Also, I think Danny has a Video on the MoI resources page to do accurate tapers with MoI.

Hi to all,

I downloaded and unzipped Danny's video, but I was unable to view it in Windows Media player or Windows Movie maker. I get the audio, but no video.

Any clues?

Thanks.

Michael T.

Hi Michael T,

From memory I think I recorded the video in divx format to keep the size down, it sounds like that you haven't got the divx codec loaded on your computer, I believe you can download it for free from the net, otherwise you can download a free player that I use personally which covers most video formats from http://portableapps.com/apps/music_video/mplayer_portable and it's portable too, so you can leave it on your thumb drive.

-

Yes it was the DivX codec. Didnt you also do the demo in the forum Danny? Or was that just text explanation and the video came later? I remember you were doing Jing for awhile.

Hi Michael T,

You can download this media player for Free & it'll play just about anything you'll throw at it.

http://www.videolan.org/vlc/

regards Colin

I used to use videolan but the playback would always start out garbled for a lot of my videos.

I've now switched to KMPlayer and it's way better (imo) than videolan...

Just do a google for the download.

-Will

Thanks everyone. I'll try those when I get home.

Thanks again.

Michael T.

Player works great everyone! Fantastic video Danny for the draft/taper by expressions! This does the trick for the most part.

Thanks again everyone!

Keep up the great work Michael G.!

Michael T.

Hi Michael,

Another vote for Tapered Extrusions in the next version please.

Also, a feature suggestion for the Tapered Extrusions UI too:
(Reusing the standard 'Extrude' workflow to begin.)
Select Extrude;
Select curves, edges, or faces to extrude;
Input (Extrude) Distance;
Input taper value, optionally 'by angle', or ' by distance' (from edge, at end of extrusion), or leave as zero/blank for parallel extrusion;

then, the really useful bit:
'Push Done to taper all sides [side-faces?] or Select sides [side faces?] to extrude normal.'


Attached is a simple example where the above process would have been useful; I wanted the front face to remain normal to the extrude direction so I could later add other solids to that face.


Regarding feedback and suggestions in general, could you or have you considered a www.uservoice.com or www.getsatisfaction.com account to enable users to easily see, find and vote on what features other users would like to see in upcoming releases, rather than both you and us, (especially us) searching the forum?


Many thanks a super product. Keep up the great work.
Hamish

PS - I downloaded Danny's 'Accurate_Tapers_MoI_V2.zip' and each time I try opening the file it's reported as being a corrupt zip. Any ideas Danny?

Hi Hamish, thanks for posting the example, that helps a lot to understand what you are describing.


I see - but unfortunately that would add considerable complexity in my implementation.

One problem is that I don't believe the geometry library that I use is set up with a function that would do a "partial taper" like that - it has something to extrude an outline in with a draft angle (which I plan on hopefully being able to use to implement this in MoI) but it does not have any kind of "exceptions" set up in it to make only some pieces be straight and some tapered.

So to do what you ask would probably require writing a completely new geometry generation mechanism from scratch, which tends add a lot of difficulty and time involved.

So I'm sorry but likely when I get a chance to add in a tapered/draft angle extrude, I probably will not be able to do the partial draft feature in it.


It looks like you could get the result you wanted though by having your base curve extend towards that "non-tapered" side a bit, and then after doing a full tapered extrusion you could just slice off the part that you did not want by boolean difference with a line. Or for that particular kind of case with a right-angled join to the adjacent pieces I think you could leave out that segment from the tapered extrusion and then do a regular non-tapered extrude of it to get the result.



Actually, I have a wishlist already set up here:
http://moi3d.com/wiki/Wishlist

If you'd like to add a vote, you can set up an account on the wiki and add your entry in to that list.

But it's also fine to just post your requests here in the forum, it's ok to just start a new topic and post in it without necessarily needing to search for any previous discussions. If you do want to search, just searching that wiki wishlist would do fine for that.

Just a simple "count the votes" mechanism is not really that great for me, for instance if you just placed a vote for "tapered extrusion" instead of posting here about it, I probably would not have ever received the information about the specific details that you were hoping to have in it.

- Michael

Thanks Michael.

Re the complexity stuff; no worries - c'est la vie.
Thanks for the info re posting suggestions and the wiki wishlist too.


Your suggestions gave me another idea for creating 'partial-tapered' extrusions, which is to 'loft the tapered faces as a surface between top and bottom curves':




This method can result in zero trimming operations being required, especially if the initial offset is done with the outline curve incomplete where the 'extrude-normal' face is desired.

As an experiment, I tried closing the top and bottom curves just prior to lofting. Doing so required untwisting the automatic loft guide curve; so the open curve method in the animation is less hassle overall.

Hope it might be useful to someone else.


Edit: And then I discovered DannyT's Accurate Tapers video - which is a much better way. Thanks DannyT.

Cheers,
Hamish