Hi All

Saw this video on NX's xform tool. Looks really good. Obviously NX is a different price class to MoI but would be great to have edit-ability of sweeps, network surfaces survive trims or fillet operations.

http://cadjunkie.com/nx7-5-xform-rocks-my-socks/

Also lots of good videos on Cadjunkies site which show good construction principles which are relevant to MoI.

regards

Jamie

Hi Jamie, it's really cool! If you need that functionality it is actually possible to use MoI in combination with NX - just export your model in STEP format out from MoI and then import it into NX and you should be able to use those tools on it.

It's not going to be feasible to have a 100% exact same kind of tool directly built into MoI anytime too soon, it's a quite difficult system to set up.

Not only is it just hard to implement, but also the level of complexity in how it functions is not really a great fit with MoI as well.

I mean that tool is pretty complex - just look at the part of the video where he goes to set it up, he says select the top face of your model, then go to the "parameterization" section of the toolbox and alter some settings there. Then go to the "Pole selection" section of the toolbox and uncheck the "Deselect poles automatically" button, and then the Move method is set to world coordinates out of the 6 different possible move settings under that section. That seems like quite a lot of complex and technical settings that need to be used in order to make this tool work.

On the other hand, simplicity and a streamlined workflow and ease of use are all big priorities for MoI, so it doesn't quite fit in as well with MoI to try and slap in a tool where you have to know what the "Deselect poles automatically" checkbox option in some big control panel does in order to make the tool work... :)

But I do expect to improve MoI's surface control point editing tools in the future - the focus in MoI on that is just on editing one independent surface though and not on editing it while it is an actual part of a solid (because modifying the other parts of the solid to adapt to the change is what is difficult to implement) but that is a kind of generally similar way of shaping things. You can get some of that by control point manipulation in MoI right now - use Edit > Separate to break your surface out from a solid so that it is a single surface, and then use Edit > Show pts to turn on the surface control points.

If you want to deform a plane you need to set up a planar surface that is made up of a bunch of points instead of only 4 corner points in it, see
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1313.2

So using that method in MoI you can edit the control points of the surface to shape it how you want, and then you construct the other pieces of the solid like the side walls after you have finished with the control point tweaking.

One thing that is a little bit odd about the type of editing as shown in the video is that if you want a really bendy and swoopy shape it is kind of a bit strange conceptually to start out with an initial shape like a box that has absolutely no relation to the final shape that you're actually trying to achieve. One of the general modeling ideas that I'm trying to pursue with MoI is to try and make it possible to draw the shape that you would like to create more directly somehow using guide curves and things like that.

- Michael

Hi guys,

I use MoI with NX almost every day. They work great together.

Michael T.

Hi Michael

I definitely take your point on complexity and that it is indeed strange to start out with a box if you wanted something completely different. I like the idea of defining your shape with curves/guides, maybe being able to take out, add, replace and experiment with the curves. Like you can add a point to a curve in a revolved shape for instance and it remains editable and updates the shape.

Although remaining editable after making a solid would be great I can see the trade off with complexity.





Thinking about it more, what would be good is to be able to toggle between the solid state and untrimmed surface state. Sort of explode and untrim all. So toggling between between the first two states in the pic. This means you could merge to make the solid in this case then when you want to adapt the surfaces you explode/untrim all, make changes then toggle back to the merge. At the moment you explode and get the separate trimmed surfaces (the third block) which means selecting edges and untrimming before continuing. In fact any chance of a script to explode and untrim all?

I hope some of that was clear ;-)

kind regards

Jamie

About the NX Video, I had this message!

< Sorry

The creator of this video has not given you permission to embed it on this domain. This is a Vimeo Plus feature.

Hi Jamie,

> Although remaining editable after making a solid would
> be great I can see the trade off with complexity.

One of the tricky parts about that is that the surrounding faces may not have underlying surfaces that extend far enough to fill stuff in, in which case they need to be extended and doing that well is a difficult business.


> In fact any chance of a script to explode and untrim all?

Yup, try the attached UntrimAll plugin. To install it, unzip it and copy the 2 files into the \commands sub-folder that is underneath MoI 2.0's main installation folder.

That will then make a new command named UntrimAll available - to trigger it make a new shortcut key and put in UntrimAll as the command name.

That should then give you a combined explode and untrim of all exploded faces in one keystroke.

- Michael

Hi Michael

The UntrimAll plugin works perfectly. thankyou for taking the time to do it, a very happy customer here. Incidentally it is also useful for removing fillets. I also tested it untrimming an object from rhino to remove fillets.

One other thought and I have no idea how possible it is, when you explode and untrim you have the original surfaces so you can tweak with control points or move the entire surface but you have lost the associativity with the original curves that created it. So if it was a loft you cannot edit the loft curves and the surface update. Of course its not that difficult to recreate the surface if needed but it would be great if once exploded out of the solid the surfaces found the curves that made them so the remained editable.

thanks again

Jamie

You're welcome Jamie, I hope it is useful!

> but it would be great if once exploded out of the solid
> the surfaces found the curves that made them so the
> remained editable.

So unfortunately trying to make some kind of persistent deep linkage between objects like you're describing is not really something that's feasible to cook up with a script.

In the future I do want to work on making some deeper history functionality, but that will involve a lot of new core mechanisms and not just scripts.

The way that I would hope to get it working eventually would be that you could set up your curves, create surfaces from them, and then use boolean merge to make the solid part, but each of these steps would be remembered so you could then edit a curve and then those actions would all recalculate.

- Michael

Can you post a little image or a shema of the Scrip explode + untrim
- before / after -

Hi Pilou, there's an image in Jamie's previous post here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4068.4

The "UntrimAll" plugin will do a combination of Edit > Separate to break a solid into individual separate surfaces, and then also remove all trim curves from those surfaces so that you'll see the full underlying surfaces (this is the same as selecting all edges of those surfaces and pushing delete).

So if you have a solid like the object on the right-hand side of Jamie's post above, when you run UntrimAll you will get a result with all surfaces untrimmed like the result on the left-hand side of Jamie's image.

- Michael

THX !

Hi Michael

I didn't expect that kind of linking would be possible short term. What you describe is exactly what I would like to see, I guess its a question of managing the flip side of that, like what happens when it goes wrong. Will it confuse people, but I am confident you will find an elegant solution and I look forward to seeing it develop.

thanks again

Jamie

Thanks for the cadjunkies link! I just signed up and I'm looking at some of the freebie videos now.