Michael,

I come from a theatrical design background and learned my craft in the old school where we used pencil and paper. Each design was generated, as in architecture, by 2d construction dwgs. You could do your conceptualizations with some fairly free line work, then do an overlay and trace off what you wanted to keep, in effect deleting those lines that you did not need. (No erasing needed.)

As I incorporate MOI3d into my design work, I would like to use this software to do as much conceptual 2d drafting as possible. The draw curve, edit and transform tools are generally very helpful.

However, if for example, you were to draw four lines forming a rectangle, letting the lines intersect and extend past each other slightly as they would if you worked rapidly, those extensions would have to be deleted for the finished dwg. Using MOI's Trim tool you would have to select the cutting line then the line to be cut, then the part to be removed. This is common in most softwares, both 2d and 3d, and is fine perhaps for most users, but not for many artists, designers or sculptors. In short, it just takes too much time. The artist just wants to get on with the design and not spend time with the mechanical aspects of it. I appologize if I have insulted anyone or made this long winded.

May I ask for, or suggest a change or option to the Trim tool? Would it be possible to select the Trim tool and just click any overlapping line segment and simply have it disappear? You could go through a dwg and clean it up very rapidly. Vectorworks is the only software that allows you to do that, and it took them to version 8 or 9 to refine it. The software makes the correct assumption that the part you select is what you want to delete. What a time saver.

Any thoughts on this are appreciated.
Rich

There is also the option to "keep"..These 2 options combined would be much faster than the other Pick-pick method...IMO.

Hi Rich, so making a change to the Trim tool to automatically trim out the area where you clicked on would work great for trimming lines but would unfortunately have a bad side effect of making it more difficult to trim surfaces in many cases.

Currently the Trim tool is meant to be a multipurpose tool that can be used for either trimming curves or trimming surfaces, and especially for the surface case it is much easier to be able to see and select the actual cut up surface fragment pieces rather than just trying to guess at where they will be on an uncut surface that you clicked on as would be the case in the system that you're describing.

Also with the current workflow of having a fragment selection step it allows for the option of selecting the pieces you want to keep rather than the piece you want to discard - that can also be helpful in situations with surfaces where the pieces you want to remove are submerged within other objects.


However, I think a good solution would be to have some kind of alternate Trim command, something like "QuickTrim" that would behave like you describe, I think that will be something that I'll add in the future which would be useful for kind of 2D production drafting trimming where you want to streamline the number of steps.


Please see these previous threads for some additional discussion on this subject:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3806.1
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=3606.1


- Michael

Hi Rich, also another note - in addition to Trim you can use the Boolean commands on curves, and if you've got a case where you've got several curves forming a closed shape with some excess overshoot bits on them you can use Boolean Union on that kind of a thing to trim off all the little pieces in one shot.

So for example, say you've got 4 lines set up like so:



You can select all of them like this:



And then run Construct > Boolean > Union, and that will then spit out this result:




So that's actually quicker than a "QuickTrim" would be anyway since it does it all in one go without any clicking on any little individual bits required.

But it will only work in that way if the curves make a closed region - that's what it looks for in this case to find which piece to keep and which ones to throw away. If you don't have a closed region you can still run the boolean on it but it will generate a bunch of sliced up pieces instead.

If you need to do this often you can set up a keyboard shortcut and for the command part put: BooleanUnion - then with that set you can select a set of curves as above and get them all trimmed and cleaned up and joined into a closed curve with just one keypress and no other clicking required at all.

This curve Boolean is not quite 100% reliable though, you may find some cases where it does not clean every single corner (I think there's a problem in concave areas of a shape or something like that, if your shape is convex it seems to work better...) so occasionally you may need to run Edit > Separate on the result and do some manual trimming on a couple of spots that it missed.

- Michael

Hi Rich, also one additional note on Trim as it works currently - when you go to pick the pieces to discard or keep (depending on what the Mode option is set to in the Trim command), you can use window selection at that point as well as single click type selection.

Window selection can help in a lot of situations, like for instance here wanting to trim off the ends of all these lines:



When you run the Trim command and select the horizontal line as the cutting object, instead of clicking on all the little individual fragments you can do a window select to grab them all in one step like this:





- Michael

Michael,

Thank you for pointing out the conflict in such a multipurpose tool. Obviously trying to make such a tool solve every problem would lead to the kind of bloat that you find in many other softwares. One of the joys of MOI3d, for me, is its clarity and uncluttered workspace. My suggestion would assist the drafting stage of process but perhaps not benefit the overall purpose of the software.

Thanks also for the examples and suggestions you make in regard to different approaches to the problem. Understanding the permutations of what can be done with a software helps broaden the users perspective and the users mind.

An alternate "Quicktrim" command or the possibility to assign a hotkey for such an action would be welcome by me, but not at the expense of diminishing the fluidity and and effectiveness of MOI3d.

Richard

Hi Richard,

> An alternate "Quicktrim" command or the possibility to
> assign a hotkey for such an action would be welcome by
> me, but not at the expense of diminishing the fluidity
> and and effectiveness of MOI3d.

Yeah, having it as a separate command would be useful and should not have any negative side effects as far as adding complexity to MoI's default UI, because it would probably be delivered as an optional plugin component that you could have as a shortcut key assignment if you wish.

In the future I want to make it easier to access plug-ins, like have some kind of plug-in browser where you could go over some lists of various optional commands and install any that you'd find useful for specific situations.

I'm not quite sure exactly when those various pieces (like an actual QuickTrim command or the plug-in browser) will all come together yet though, but I think I'll be making a try during the v3 timeframe.

I do have a general goal of improving MoI in the 2D drafting area over time in various other ways as well...

- Michael

Just a thought as I am reading this: Would it be possible to extend the lifetime of construction lines?

Sometimes I use the same construction lines a couple of times, in which case I draw regular lines that are deleted later. But maybe this concept of construction lines could be extended: They are a new Type 'construction' of straight lines and remain on the screen until thrown away. The ephemeral character is what makes them useful: They could be discarded without trimming and deleting.

Hi Ditto, there are a couple of plug-ins that you can add in to get some construction lines that last for longer than the current command, check them out here:
http://kyticka.webzdarma.cz/3d/moi/#KeepCLine

If you set up the script there labeled "Keep construction line", on a shortcut key, that will then cause any construction lines created inside of the current command to stick around after the command is ended instead of going away automatically like they normally do.

Also see here for a custom command that you can set up that is just for setting up clines that stick around:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=1029.1


It would be nice in the future to add in some more methods for manipulating construction lines, but it can be hard to figure out a good UI for managing them that is not too obtrusive.

- Michael

Hi Michael, thanks for the pointers. These look actually to be what I was looking for. Great stuff. And I should have known that there is a way in MoI: This software is just brilliant (a small reflection of it's inventor, certainly ;)

Cheers,
Ditto

Thanks Ditto! :)

- Michael

And make lines or curves in a special color say "pinky" don't make the same work like construction 's lines?
You can use them like a special grid of construction, no ?
And hide them as you want ;)

You could also use your regular lines as you were, name them something like 'construct' and lock them, in that way object snap still works with them without worrying about moving or deleting them accidentally.

Cheers
~Danny~