Does exist something during the selection when you have make a first choice (Object, Face, side, curve...) except the "general selection"
Existing : first selection, you move over something that "enlight" and you must click for select
It will be cool if that selection will just after the first click "move over" + Shift (without click) = Selection ! (and keep of course the click for unselect / select single thing )
It's more easy to press or keep pressed a key than a click (pen graphic has generally one or two button = shift or other key) for don't touch the keyboard :)

Hi Pilou, there isn't anything currently for this, but it is an interesting idea.

It sounds related to a "selection painter" tool. A "selection painter" would be a selection tool that you could activate and then click and drag and everything that your mouse encounters during the drag would become selected.

If this was available as a dedicated tool, then that tool could be used by pen-tablet users, and that would make it easier to have something like shift+drag be an alternative method to activate that tool.

But one thing that might be better is to have Shift+drag always activate the secondary selection mode, like for instance right now it is the rectangle area select. This is because sometimes you might want to use this type of selection in a crowded area where you don't have an empty spot to click on which is normally how it is triggered. Then there could be a setting for what the current secondary selection operation is, like rectangle, lasso, selection painter...

However it will be a while before I'll be able to experiment with actually adding any of this though.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

Is there any reason to (1) exclude Hide command from Undo stack and (2) preserve it from repeating by right-click in the viewport?

Could it be possible to leave object(s) selected after joining or separating them using Join/Separate command?

Petr

XAML Export would be a nice feature. I'm sure it doesn't fit the 80/20 rule (yet), but there is a XAML (pronounce 'zamel') future and in the coming years I expect most contending apps will provide some support. I'll bet that Michael knows all about this technology! :-)

XAML's 3D objects are SVG-like and it seems there's a push that will attract game developers. At the moment there are computer performance issues regarding screen redraws/aninmations (video hardware is not being leveraged well as yet), but this will be cleared-up soon enough. Anyway, this is just a though for accessing additional verticals ($$$) if you know what I mean.

-Haik

Keywords: XAML, Microsoft, WPF, Windows Presentation Foundation

> Is there any reason to (1) exclude Hide command from Undo stack
> and (2) preserve it from repeating by right-click in the viewport?

Hi Petr, this is not really done intentionally, it is kind of a side effect from the way that Hide works, since it is a bit of inline script instead of being a true command.

It is set up this way so that you can hide/show objects while you are inside some other running command.

But a side effect of this is that it doesn't get the undo handling or right-click repeat, both of which are handled automatically only for true commands.

Eventually I should be able to tune this up, but I think it will be like this for V1.


> Could it be possible to leave object(s) selected after joining or separating
> them using Join/Separate command?

This should be pretty easy to do, I guess I had better make the objects flash so that there is a visual cue that something happened to them. I'll see if I can get to this after I have finished cleaning up Blend.

- Michael

re: XAML

Hi Haik, I have been following the XAML/WPF technology somewhat.

It will probably be a while before I'll be able to add this in, file format work in general can tend to be a bit finicky, just because it needs a lot of testing. For the V1 release I'm only planning on trying to add AI support to the current file formats.

For a future version past V1 I want to make it easier to have a plug-in system so that different exporters can be developed as plug-ins more easily.

One thing that is kind of weird about WPF 3D is I don't understand why they didn't build in support for directly reading in a couple of the most common 3D file formats, like .3ds or .obj for example. It is fine to have an internal mesh object representation that can be specified with XAML, but it seems like it would be quite convenient to leave things in a common file format and have XAML or WPF code read those files in directly...

Maybe if WPF 3D gets used more often they will add this in and then XAML export would not be really necessary...

- Michael

Yeah, I agree with you on the direct integration of known/established 3D formats. That would open WPF up a lot.

As far as it goes now is the XAML tool "Expression Blend" will import .OBJ files. From there it's all XAML with no path back. Thanks for thinking about it!

-Haik


ref- http://www.microsoft.com/products/expression/en/Expression-Blend/default.mspx

re: XAML.

It's just rather odd that you have to convert at all.

Imagine if you had to convert every bitmap image file into a "XAML" bitmap first before you could use it!

- Michael

Hum hum :)
As we can have images with background transparent inside Moi
Is not possible to have an automatic drawing of extern curves (and internal if another transparent aera inside) of the Object directly in Moi?
As Moi is so speedy to modelize, we are inclining to become some lazzy :D (I have moved all on the image so nothing is aligned!)

> Is not possible to have an automatic drawing of extern curves (and
> internal if another transparent aera inside) of the Object directly in Moi?

You mean making MoI automatically trace the contours of your bitmap to generate curves?

Unfortunately that's pretty difficult to do well... It would take quite a long time to come up with something. Maybe someday.

Once there is AI format support you should be able to use other existing tracing software though, I think that there are a few different things out there for automatic tracing for 2D illustration programs.

-Michael

A simple curves "Formula Creator" (2D or 3D)
maybe not so sophisticated than this free one :) http://k3dsurf.sourceforge.net/
but something for sinusoïd, helicoïd, ...etc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_curves

> Could it be possible to leave object(s) selected after joining or
> separating them using Join/Separate command?

This one is now set up for the next beta.

- Michael

Id like to see the icons for adjusting the view at the bottom of the perspective viewport removed. I find the mouse commands for changing view very easy and convenient to work with, and the icons only take up space and get in the way.

HI Arquebus - you can (nearly) completely remove them by deleting this UI file from your installation:
C:\Program Files\MoI beta Mar-9-2007\ui\ViewControls.htm

Right now there will still be a tiny rectangle left over after removing that, but I will see if I can tune up the next beta so that if you remove that UI file there won't be anything down there at all.


However, there are 2 important controls on that panel for zoom area and reset in addition to zoom/pan/rotate.

Even if you use the mouse commands for zoom/pan/rotate, it is still quite useful to have these other 2 commands available.

- Michael

about the curve from a "formula inbox" ? :)

> about the curve from a "formula inbox" ? :)

Hi Pilou, it would be fun to do it, but it would take quite a lot of time to do the UI and parsing work.

It will probably be quite a while before I can find enough time to work on something like that...

There are just too many other basic things to do first. For example I could probably do a formula inbox for version 2.0, but only if I canceled work on object properties and object organization tools...

If you can figure out some way for me to get more than 24 hours in one day, then I could do it sooner! :)

- Michael

> It's not possible to have just a list of generic "pre calculated" curves?
> And we can modifiy it on the screen with the normal function, Scale, etc...

But do you really need a command for this? From what you're describing there just importing an .igs or .3dm file with those curves in it would work the same way.

One thing you might try: http://www.graphcalc.com/index.shtml I saw some people mention it can export to DXF. Maybe it is possible to convert to MoI through Amapi. If you have a few that you want to convert, you can post them here and I can convert them from DXF for you using Rhino too...

- Michael