Hi Michael,
I was looking at the loft guides and wanted to bring up the aligment of them. While working with mutiple shapes, could there be a mechanism for some type of "alignment" short of dragging them to something close?

I couldnt figure out if there was a way.

Hi Burr,

> While working with mutiple shapes, could there be a mechanism
> for some type of "alignment" short of dragging them to
> something close?

What kind of thing did you have in mind?

One issue is that there is not any restriction in Loft that all the loft profiles have to be on parallel planes - so it could be kind of difficult to use some UI that only worked well for that one particular kind of case...

- Michael

Well, wasnt really sure how it worked internally. I guess I was looking at selecting multiple "Points" to manipulate, whether with the align tools or the edit frame.

It just seemed like it would help the surface if they were all more even or "directional" (Leaning in the same direction as the flow of the surface) Dragging them one by one gets things straightend out fairley well.

It may be not that usual of an issue, working with so many lofting profiles...

Hi Burr,

> whether with the align tools or the edit frame.

There's several difficulties with trying that - those points are just markers that the Loft command adds as part of it's UI, they aren't just regular geometry.

Also with align there is a problem where you're already in the Loft command and you'd be trying to run the Align command on top of that - that would be running 2 commands at the same time which is not how things work since it can easily lead to confusing situations like imagine if you're currently in the Line command and you instead wanted to run Polyline, so you click on Polyline to start that command. That would then be confusing if you finished the polyline command and then were still running the Line command.

Probably the way to do it would be to have an option to just use the "natural" seam point location for all curves instead of the calculated one, and then you would probably use some other tool to set all the seam points of the closed curves to a common line. That's something that I could add in the future at some point, but I'm not sure when.


> It may be not that usual of an issue, working with so many lofting profiles...

Yeah, it's not typical for just creating new objects from scratch - it's something that you're running into because you're doing more of a "reverse engineering" type task here instead of a "drawing objects from scratch" type workflow.

Reverse engineering tends to need a variety of tools that are different (or have different options) from regular drawing tools, it's kind of an area that MoI is not very targeted at handling really, at least not so much right now.

- Michael