Hi Michael,

> here is the previous discussion thread.......

That explains everything, that was 21 Jan 2010, I can't even remember last week ;) but when reading it doesn't seem that long that we discussed it, is that date right?

Anyway it all makes sense now, it was good to see the ideas bouncing back and forth and evolve into something real, so cool.

Cheers
~Danny~

Michael,
The wish list thread had quite a few ideas you suggested might show up in V3, but it's hard to know (especially for someone relatively new to MoI) what's been updated or changed in V3 beta.

Any chance there could be a thread just for features/changes related to V3 betas so we can tell the difference between a bug and pilot error when using existing tools?

Also, one of the ideas had to do with something of a graphical scripts repository. As flexable as scripts are for those who enjoy adding to the software, tinkering around in the guts of the program isn't for everyone (like me!) and in some ways runs counter to your ethos of simplicity in design/UI. If there could be something like a single button (menu choice?) to pop up a window for selecting scripts (and for loading/deleting them) that would make life easier for those of us who can't recall all the scripts or where to find them.
Thanks.

Hi Danny,

> but when reading it doesn't seem that long that we
> discussed it, is that date right?

Yeah I think that date is correct - at the time it was something that I put on the back burner to look at later for v3.

Then at some point not too long ago I got the idea to use the same area to handle filtering as well - when that clicked it got higher in priority to implement it because basically when I see a good way to add multiple functions that reuse some existing part of the UI those kinds of things jump up high in my priority to work on.

- Michael

Hi Greg,

> Any chance there could be a thread just for features/changes
> related to V3 betas so we can tell the difference between a bug
> and pilot error when using existing tools?

I think that I'm going to make a page in the wiki to collect all the v3 beta release notes in one place.


> As flexable as scripts are for those who enjoy adding to
> the software, tinkering around in the guts of the program
> isn't for everyone (like me!) and in some ways runs counter
> to your ethos of simplicity in design/UI.

In a different sense it actually helps to maintain simplicity since in many cases if someone needs a special case function to help them out for their particular kind of work, I can add that in as a plug-in that helps them get that particular function handled but without adding complexity to the big majority of other users that don't need it.

But yes it would definitely be good to have a better overall mechanism for deploying plug-ins and installing them.

The tricky part about that is that it will involve quite a bit of work to make a more refined mechanism for that, and the payoff is not really quite as big functionally as compared to a new modeling tool like the new Flow command for example.

That's why that area has not really been a high priority for overhauling yet. I do expect to get to it at some point.


> If there could be something like a single button
> (menu choice?) to pop up a window for selecting scripts
> (and for loading/deleting them) that would make life easier
> for those of us who can't recall all the scripts or where to find them.

Yeah the main idea for it would be to have an additional "Plug-ins" button on the bottom toolbar that would pop up a menu with them all listed on it so you could launch them from there.

How many plug-ins do you have installed currently that you are having trouble keeping track of them? Do you often use all the ones that you have installed, or are you just kind of collecting them?

- Michael

Well, I really am not going crazy!
When I add a shortcut key in MoI3Beta, the same shortcut key appears in Moi2.
And vice versa.
(Just wondering)

Hi Brian,

> When I add a shortcut key in MoI3Beta, the same shortcut key
> appears in Moi2.
> And vice versa.

Yup, that's correct - the shortcuts are stored in the moi.ini file and by default the moi.ini file is stored in a central location that is used by all versions of MoI.

It is possible to set things up so that each version has its own separate moi.ini file if you want them to have different settings between them, let me know if you want to know how to set that up.

- Michael

Michael,

>How many plug-ins do you have installed currently that you are having trouble keeping track of them? Do you often use all the ones that you have installed, or are you just kind of collecting them?

So far I've only experimented with a few of the ones I found on Petr's page that sounded as if they might be useful in the future. (Annoyingly, the "cyber nanny" at work blocks Petr's page as well as the page that shows the names of the scripts with small pictures to illustrate them. And for some reason, my home computer won't load those images so I've never been able to use that "cheat sheet"! (Grumble grumble)). My modeling techniques (mostly because of my Solidworks background) tend to lean heavily on basic tools, extrudes, revolves, sweeps etc. Even a super-cool tool like flow would rarely find use in my projects. (BTW, not a critique of flow which I like, even if I don't know when I'd use it.)

I guess my issue is with knowing what IS available as I work. You know, the right tool for the right job. I've read through the list, but quickly forget what is there (so much to choose from). Perhaps all I really want (now that I think of it) is a pdf "manual" (with lots of pictures!) of the scripts with examples of their implementation. Currently I can't create such a thing myself. Nothing worse than spending hours working around something there's a script for. (For example, I do A LOT of product concepts in Illustrator and only just discovered a script called "round any corner" which in now saving me HOURS of work, but to find that script (by accident) spending hours reading through forums, which I typically don't have much spare time for.)

Anyway, still love this product and plan to eventually incorporate it into my professional work flow.

The documentation on Triple Squid can be turned into a 33 page PDF, with PDFCreator.

The other thing, while still in the development process is you can just ask here and get a link in just a few minutes!

Hi Greg,

> I guess my issue is with knowing what IS available as I work.

Well, for the most part those plug-ins are to help with pretty specific special case type work.


> My modeling techniques (mostly because of my Solidworks
> background) tend to lean heavily on basic tools, extrudes,
> revolves, sweeps etc.

There is a pretty good chance that really none of the plug-ins would particularly help you with this kind of work though.

Can you give an example of say one particular plug-in that you have already found useful or that you think you will need to use in the future?

In general if something has a widely applicable use, I try to incorporate those into the standard tools instead of only as a plug-in.


> Nothing worse than spending hours working around something
> there's a script for.

If you run into something where it looks like a special tool would help you save several hours of work, I'd recommend posting a question about it here in the forum. That way you can get an answer that will direct you to the right tool if there is one that matches what you need, or it may give me some idea on how to make a new plugin or even how to improve the standard toolset to help with what you are trying to do.


> but to find that script (by accident) spending hours reading
> through forums, which I typically don't have much spare time for.)

You can start your own new thread for your question so you can just look at it for a reply instead of searching through the whole forum.

- Michael

Michael, (as always) thanks for the thoughtful reply.

I'll wade back through the plug-ins when I get a few minutes to spare (how can I be so busy all the time?!!) and let you know what I've tried and think I'd find useful to have one hand and more visible.

One thing I've noticed as I've read through many of the threads (changing subject here) is how often people get messed up by lines which they thought met at a common endpoint, but when you zoom in are off by a tiny amount. Along with keeping tangency between lines (something I think I remember you discussing) would it also be possible to "weld" endpoints together (as apposed to joining both entire lines)such that you can't accidentally move a line's endpoint off it's fellow while editing it?

Hi Greg,

> Along with keeping tangency between lines (something I think
> I remember you discussing) would it also be possible to "weld"
> endpoints together (as apposed to joining both entire lines)such
> that you can't accidentally move a line's endpoint off it's fellow
> while editing it?

You mean with a plug-in? That would be quite difficult to do with a plug-in because you're not talking there about just a new command to add that would perform some one time calculation - you're talking there about modifying the behavior of a large number of other existing commands like all transform commands, object dragging, etc...

So I can't see how that would be implemented as a plug-in, it would need to be a modification to some of the core MoI logic.

One problem with something like that it that it's not feasible to only implement just a welder - you may want to later on move its endpoint so you also need an unwelding mechanism to manage it as well.

Then there would be quite a lot of questions to answer for other kinds of editing tools - if you tried to move a line that had an welded endpoint, what would you expect to happen, should just nothing at all happen or should everything else that was connected to that welded point also move? If nothing were to happen, then that opens some doors to some extremely confusing scenarios, like say you receive a file from someone that happens to have these "welded" pieces in them, but of course you don't know anything about that yourself so you'll get extremely confused when you try to move some things around just in the course of examining the object and you don't get any response at all.

What about other kinds of editing tools than transformations like trimming or booleans - would they fail if they would produce an object that did not include an endpoint in that particular location?

Anyway, I can certainly imagine an enormous list of side effects and concerns similar to these ones...

For the most part your best bet to make sure things touch is to have object snap on when you initially draw it. If you don't have object snap on and you're just "eyeballing" things so that they look close to one another but are not actually snapped on to one another, then that will cause problems because there the ends won't be exactly touching if you do it that way.

- Michael

Hey Michael.

Clearly I'm not intimately familiar with the ins and outs of implimenting an idea like welding endpoints together, so you'll have to forgive the idea's bluesky nature. (Clients of mine always ask for the impossible out of ignorance, so why should I be any different!)

I was imagining a tool much like join (and you're right, unweld as well) which, at the line/curve level might show a dot or highlight around the welded endpoint(s), letting you know something is going on there.

As to it's behavior, it would make sense to me to be able to move any points including the welded point independent of the other points, but not the line/curve as a whole. I imagine you could transform the line in any way as long as the welded point was the anchor and did not move. For instance, rotate around the welded point, stretch/lengthen from the welded point etc.

Now that I'm writing this I'm reminded of Illustrator and how it differentiates between independant lines/curves and continuous (after independant lines/curves are joined at their endpoints) lines/curves. The lines/curves and points are fully editable in either case and only the lines/curves behavior tells you if they are a series of lines/curves or a continuous line/curve. Illustrator also has snapping, which I was greatful to find in MoI, as it makes life SOOO much easier.

Not certain I understand the issue with the trim or boolean operations. Once a welded endpoint is trimmed off or removed due to a boolean, wouldn't it just be deleted from the resultant line?

Anyway, just food for thought.

Hi Greg,


That sounds like it would lead to the kind of potential confusion that I was mentioning earlier - say you receive a file that has a line that has one of these welded points in it, then you select that line and just try to move it off to the side - according to what you are describing here it would just remain locked in place because of its welded endpoint.

Also if I understand correctly, if you had a line that had welded endpoints on 2 sides it would then be totally locked in place and no transformation of any kind would modify it?

So like I mentioned previously, I can see quite a lot of complications with that system - also it is not easy to implement since it would involve extra checking for if a transform was allowed by every single kind of transformation tool.

An even bigger problem yet is that it would probably not even really solve a problem with people creating inaccurate drawings in the first place because you would need to do a special extra step to produce the welding, and that's not likely to be something that a beginning user is going to know a priori .

Most of the time I think that inaccurate drawings are not generated due to people moving stuff around - most of the time I think they are created because things are not snapped together using object snaps when they are initially drawn. I suspect that a welding system as you're describing wouldn't really help with this type of problem.

It could be useful for other things, but since it would involve a kind of extra layer of checking on the part of numerous transformation commands, that's kind of an indication that it's a quite complex system. That kind of complexity can lead to a lot of various side effects, like that one I mentioned before about being surprised when receiving a file that behaved oddly when you tried to edit it since you were not aware of this big welded system being set up is only one.

Right now I'd have to say that it seems pretty impractical to try and implement that.

I have thought before about having a different system for building geometry, one more similar to how polygon mesh geometry is constructed where you have things like faces that share a common vertex point. But overall that's a pretty different kind of a system than how the geometry library that MoI uses is based on.

So there's definitely some interesting possibilities with the idea, but it just does not seem likely to be something that would be "implementable" within MoI, at least with with its current regular geometry. It could be possible in the future with a different type of polygon mesh entity type that was a kind of different class of object, like with its own separate data structures and different code paths for operating on them. That's a big task too though.

- Michael

how about an area selection that lets you choose which way to move depending on what you want to weld. (i.e. pick a base or point as an anchor and shift the selected points to that location?) I think it could be a one time operation that would not require an infinite zoom to see minor spaces and would work just like a snap command...just my 5 cents.

-Luis

Hi Luis,

> how about an area selection that lets you choose which way to
> move depending on what you want to weld. (i.e. pick a base or
> point as an anchor and shift the selected points to that location?) <...>

I'm not sure if I understand properly, but if you want to be able to zoom in to a particular point using snaps to set the point to zoom to, there is a "Zoom Area" tool available in the toolbar that's at the bottom of each viewport which will do that:



- Michael

Maybe the wording didn't quite work this time.

I meant being able to select some points around an area (the same way the you can area select points when "show points" is on) and then from that selection choose the point to which all other selected points automatically snap to without having to move each point to that particular selected snap point or anchor. Let me know if that makes more sense.

--Luis

hmmm...maybe I should say collapse to instead....

You don't want to do that with Nurbs modelling. You will end up with distorted surfaces. Best to just delete the points you don't need.

Hi Luis, right now you can use the Align tool a couple of times to do that - Align will line up one dimension (like horizontal or vertical in the viewport you are using) to the specific point that you pick.

I do plan on adding in some more tools for point editing in the future though, and some method to set all selected points to one value would probably be a part of that.

It is not good to collapse points on the same curve down to each other though.

- Michael