Hi Rudl,

> On my system it seems to run normal. It took the options
> from V2, so that my first thought was, I have installed v2.

That's good news - that's how it is supposed to work.


> Didn´t find out how flow functions.

You've got to set up both a base backbone curve (usually this will be a line), and then a target curve to use as the new backbone.

Start by selecting the objects that you want to modify. Then run the Flow command, pick the base backbone curve and then pick the target one.

Check out the attached flow_example.3dm file.

Load up the file and then select just the text so that it looks like this:



Then run Transform > Deform > Flow, then click on the line, then click on the wiggly curve above and you should get this result:





You can kind of think of the original line as a "starting spinal column" for the text. The flow command allows you to map objects between a starting spine to a different shaped spine. You can also map between surfaces, with a starting plane mapping to a bendy surface.

- Michael

Works fine on my old computer!
Bravo!

Hey, thank you Michael!
I hope to use MoI in next days more than in past months.
My first impression is very good and I think that with deformation tools like flow MoI will become very useful for complex Architecture.

Bye,

Giovanni

P.S. I had a problem in the last couple of months with V2: at start no icons was present; I need to reduce window and then maximize (I suppose a problem with latest driver or with some windows update) - with V3 no problem!!

Hi Burr,

> Michael,
> This line seems to no longer present the image listed
> as the source in the plugin gallery..

It looks like your post there is getting kind of mangled by the forum because it will think that you're trying to use that HTML as part of your message.

Try putting any code like that inside of a <code> ... </code> block here in the forum - that will prevent the forum from trying to actually use the HTML for your message itself. Or maybe it's best to post what you've got as a file attachment that way I can look at it more directly.


Oh wait a second, I know what it is - at the moment JPG files won't work in an <img> tag like that, save it as a PNG file and then it will work. I can fix that up pretty easily for the next beta, I forgot about that part because I only use PNG myself.


> I made a couple changes to the line I had been inserting
> into the sidepane.htm, to have it match the others and it
> worked OK. Just removed a "style" and couple other little
> differences...

Yeah there are a few changes in how various controls are structured - for example a <moi:CommandButton> takes its image as an icon="" attribute instead of on the style. And actually <moi:CommandButton> is a template now - you can see the template that makes it up in the file CommandButton.htm . The part that says icon="..." goes into an <img> tag that's part of the button structure.

Things like icons are now drawn by more regular <img> tags now (sometimes in templates) - before they used to be drawn by custom painting code.

Basically instead of a control being painted by custom code, they're now assemblies of HTML with stuff like images and divs with gradient backgrounds and stuff like that. The main exception is the scene browser, it has some custom painting code in it.

- Michael

I have no icon for "deform" and "flow command" and the previous customization weren't used.

But it works great.

Luca

Thanks Michael.

Maybe you should start another thread specifically for V3 beta testing related stuff.

Cheers

Hi Giovanni, yeah Flow should allow for quite a lot of curvy bendy things that would have been pretty difficult to create before.


> P.S. I had a problem in the last couple of months with
> V2: at start no icons was present; I need to reduce
> window and then maximize (I suppose a problem with
> latest driver or with some windows update) - with V3 no problem!!

This was due to some glitch introduced in Internet Explorer v9 - I'd bet that it started happening after IE9 got installed on your system.

That's a pretty good example of why I wanted to move to a different system for the UI.

- Michael

Hi Luca,

> I have no icon for "deform" and "flow command"

Yeah that's normal - I just haven't made the icons for those yet.


> and the previous customization weren't used.

That's also normal for the time being - any custom commands that you installed for v2 need to get copied into the v3 \commands folder. Tomorrow I'll post a utility program that will help with doing that.

- Michael

Hi Danny,

> Maybe you should start another thread specifically for V3 beta testing related stuff.

Yeah I need to do the official announcement thread... Coming up in a moment.

- Michael

Hi Michael

..some glitches here and there:

- UI-size skips instantly to 30, if the fader is moved (actually, MouseDown on the fader does trigger it)..after that, fader has no effect what so ever..manual entry does work though

- Long object names in the Browser (might be normal behaviour..)


cheers&good job&best of wishes,
Marco

P.S. I'm on Win 7 64bit

Hi Marco thanks for the bug report!

> - UI-size skips instantly to 30

Unfortunately I can't seem to repeat this one over here, I'll keep trying on a few different systems.

I may need to add some kind of extra debugging output to the next beta to try and track this one down.


> - Long object names in the Browser (might be normal behaviour..)

Yeah I wasn't quite sure whether to leave that or not because it is kind of good with long names to see as much of the name as you can.

But it's pretty messy having things draw over top of each other like that.

What about a kind of hybrid behavior - if there wasn't any selection dot there at all then I could let the text run into that selection dot area, but if there is a dot displaying then the text would get truncated before the dot.

The other option is to have it always truncated leaving the dot as a completely separate column but that means the selection dot will have reduced the display space for the text name in all cases.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

first, congratulation for V3! The new interface (UI) seems to work just fine.

I've tried the flow command on the file you provided and it working as expected. I then tried a surface to surface flow and here is what I get (Flow-test001). My intention was to deform a medallion from a flat surface to a rounded one. So I started simple but I didn't get what I was expecting. I assume something can be done to put the ring on the outside of the rounded surface. Also, as you can see both surface have the same Y length, so I expected the ring to have the same Y value as the original and since in the X direction the surface have different length I expected the ring to be strech.

Just to be on the safe side, I tried to make sure both surfaces had the same X and Y dimensions and this time I got what I wanted. (Flow-test002)

I think for cases like the first example, it would be nice to have somekind of option to flip the ring to the inside/outside and it maybe nice to have control over which direction (X,Y, maybe Z and XY, XZ, YZ, etc.) to stretch things beside having to do it by carefully (re) creating both surfaces.

Thanks and congratulation again,
Felix

Hi Michael

UI-size-thingy:

http://www.screencast-o-matic.com/watch/cXjZXa3uw

or




Truncate:
..thats really a tricky bit of usability-issue.
Normally i would vote for an Ellipsis (…) (bold or somehow visually enhanced) ..eventually a Guillemet (»)..but sometimes you have to deal with generated names and then this approach might not work as intended.





Cheers,
Marco

Hi Michael,

> What about a kind of hybrid behavior.......

> The other option is to have it always truncated
> leaving the dot as a completely separate column...

My vote is for either method as long as the name doesn't end up under the indicator dot.

Another thing I've noticed Michael, the icon fonts seem a little different to V2 and the Icons themselves seem to be softer or is that just me?

-

< seem to be softer or is that just me?
Maybe default screen regulates lights are not the same than your V2?

Hi Pilou,
I have both V2 and V3 on the same computer and screen.

-

""""""Another thing I've noticed Michael, the icon fonts seem a little different to V2 and the Icons themselves seem to be softer or is that just me?"""""""""

I have the difference too Danny.. Havnt look at the css or ini files for differences yet..

BTW:

I've felt it and it feels good! :o

Hi Danny,

> Another thing I've noticed Michael, the icon fonts seem a little
> different to V2 and the Icons themselves seem to be softer or
> is that just me?

It uses the same mechanism as v2 for scaling the icon images... But possibly the font size of the UI is slightly different than v2 on your system making a slight change in appearance with things like 2 pixels bigger or smaller.

Could you please post a screenshot of both v2 and v3 so I can see the difference? Please use PNG format to avoid any JPEG compression fuzz.

- Michael

Hi Marco, thanks for the UI size video. I seem to remember having a similar problem at one point before and I thought that I had gotten it fixed but apparently not all the way. Something to do with a timing issue for when the slider gets initialized. I'll examine it and see if I can get it fully solved for the next beta.

Are you use you don't want to leave the UI at size 30? That makes it really easy to read the text! ;)

- Michael