Hi,

was wondering how I can use the first cut feature and copying it around the bottle.
Do we have any "pattern copy" command or something like that?





Thanks,

-d3-

Hi d3, you can copy stuff in different ways using the array tools, they're under the Transform palette on the side pane.

Use Transform > Array > Circular for making a circular pattern.

But you generally can't easily copy an already cut hole (not without several additional trimming steps anyway), instead what you would do is copy the cutting object so that you had a circular array of cutting objects, then use those in a Boolean to all cut your base object.

MoI does not have an "automatic feature recognition" type mechanism in it that would try to figure out to directly copy the hole itself, instead you just copy the cutting objects and use them to make all the holes.

- Michael

Hi d3, here is a bit of illustration to help explain.

Say you want to make a pattern cut of a sphere.

Prepare one part of your pattern with the cutting object set up, like this for example:



However, do not actually cut your object yet. Before you cut anything, replicate your cutting object into your pattern using Transform > Array > Circular, like this:



Now do a boolean with all the cutting objects at once:



- Michael

Ok, thanks for guiding.


Wondering that is it possiple to add cut option when you choose extrusion?
I now that you can now extrude and use boolean, but it would be more usefull when cut/extrude integrated to same command?
(This is only my opinion).
Perhaps you have allready gone thru this case aslo?

Thanks,

-d3-

Hi d3, there is actually an automatic extrusion built into the Booleans already.

So for example in the case I showed previously with the sphere and the circles:



You do not need to do any extra extrusion step to make the cuts - just select the sphere, run the Boolean Difference command, and for the cutting objects pick the circle curves.

The booleans will automatically extrude those circle curves to make this result (here I just also deleted the circles after doing the cut):



So for cases like that, just perform the Boolean directly between the solid and the curves.


There are still some refinements that I want to add to this in the future - right now it works for cases where you want to cut all the way through the object. If you want to only cut to a certain depth, then that's when you would need to do an extrusion as an additional step currently.

- Michael

Hi d3, so one nice thing about having that built in directly to the Booleans is that you can do simple cuts from a 2D view by just drawing a curve and doing the cut immediately without even worrying about any difference in elevation between the curve and the solid.

For example, say you want to slice off the end of this cylinder with a level cut:



In the Front view you can just draw a line segment for where you want the cut like this:



Then select the Cylinder, run the Boolean Difference command, select the line as the cutting object and it will automatically cut it with a plane dividing it in 2 pieces (here I moved one over a bit to help illustrate):




That's despite the fact that the cylinder happened to be at some other depth than the line, looking at this case in the 3D view it actually looks like this:




But I didn't have to worry about what the depth relationship was because of the extrusion mechanism built into the booleans.

So that helps a lot to carve things up quite rapidly just using 2D curves for the cutting objects.

If it was the other way around and there was instead a cut option only inside of the Extrude command instead of in the booleans, you probably wouldn't really be able to do the whole operation from just the front view, you'd have to worry about extruding far enough to make sure the pieces hit each other.

- Michael

Hi d3, also one other note - this technique for how you can use Booleans between solids and 2D curves is actually covered in the video tutorials, especially the "Crown of clubs" one.

I'd really recommend viewing those tutorials since it will give you a pretty good overview of some of this stuff.

Those are available here:
http://moi3d.com/1.0/docs/tutorials.htm

- Michael

Ok,

need to go thru all tutorials and tips :).

Thanks,

-d3-

Hello,

Just purchased Moi a few days ago and continue to appreciate its' value and abilities. I use Solidworks as my main design tool and all but depend on the ability to drag 2D shapes through a solid, resulting in either a boss or a cut depending on where you stop. A great improvement to Sw was the development of 'Instant 3d'. I increasingly work interactively with clients, refining their ideas in real-time and they love the ability to 'see' shapes emerge and change in this fluid fashion. Could some version of this be incorporated into a future release of Moi?

I have been using Moi to fine tune Sw geometry for import to modo for rendering (as the Sw importer is horrible), but am finding it ever more useful for geometry development as my familiarity grows.

thanks for the good work Michael

KennD

Hi KennD, I'm not really familiar with exactly what "Instant 3d" is in SolidWorks, do you have some example or description of it that you could point me towards?

Is it about "direct manipulation" like grabbing an existing face of a model and moving it up or down?

If so then that is something I want to try in the future but it can take quite a lot of work to make that function well, it is not really something that comes in a totally "natural" way with NURBS objects, it involves a lot of stuff like analysis of the shapes involved.

Also it is not really an area that is handled already in the geometry library that MoI uses, so it would involve writing much of that from scratch which is possible but will involve quite a bit of work.

I think it will probably be something I can add to MoI in the future but it will probably be focused on pretty basic situations and it may take a while before it will happen.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I have attached a little AVI, captured this morning, to show some of what can be done with Instant 3D. Solidworks has had years of development and more than one coder to get to Sw2010. It is a very good tool but I find it still buggy, slow and I've spent over $15,000 on I over the last 5 years.

This is the last release I will buy as the 2012 release will be a cloud based model that provides (in my opinion) no real new functionality and much restriction.

Drag-changing model geometry this way is of great benefit and any incorporation of this functionality int Moi would be great.

best
Kenn

Hi Kenn, thanks for the illustration of Instant3D.

But yeah that will take quite a bit of work to make stuff like that happen, it is not something that is covered by the geometry library that MoI currently uses.

Probably in the future when I try to make a stab at it, it will start out just focused on moving a planar face around like when you dragged the cylinder face up and down.

Doing things like pulling part of a shape and having fillets remain the same requires even more sophisticated "feature recognition" type analysis of the shapes, that's going to be pretty difficult to achieve in MoI. Before that happens I would be more likely to have a deeper "parametric history" type method of working on stuff first because that is generally more straightforward for those kinds of edits, although still quite a lot of work itself.

- Michael

Hi Kenn, also have you looked into SpaceClaim?

It has a lot of focus on working in that "direct dragging" type of way, it could be a good fit for you.

I think that the recent versions of SpaceClaim also support copy/paste of objects back and forth between MoI as well, so it can be used in combination with MoI pretty easily.

- Michael

Moi3D and Spaceclaim and the drafting capasity from SolidEdge.
What else do we need?