Hi PaQ,

> Any chance to have an easy in/easy out option ?

Maybe - do you maybe have any good description available for what those In and Out parameters that you're showing there actually do?

Is that something related to some animation controls used in various other places in Modo?

- Michael

Thanks Michael,

> That might be possible, but it would be good to avoid controls for it that make you feel like you're taking a math quiz...

C'mon... couldn't you just imagine the suave look of a nifty scientific graphing calculator widget in MoI's side pane? ;-) I think that was a nightmare I had the other night.


I could imagine a check box in the dialog box like the one on the Spiral command, where if you check it you could then pick a twist angle at one end and then at the other.
As for an ease in / ease out control - If you could imagine a simple button in the dialog that says [with ease] that would add a spacing entry in the dialog, not unlike the one for the Fillet tool.
You could then ask for a numeric range by which to go from 0 to 88 mph in 6 seconds, so to speak, defining a soft transition on the ends - if the twist ends are inside an object's length.
For example: I could select an object, pick a start and end point, choose the rotation angle factor for one point and then the other, then specify the soft ease transition distance...
No, no... to much.... my ego would get drunk with power... ;-)

(simplicity)

Don't mind my creative rambling Michael, I'm still marveling at the twist tool's amazing potential.

Hi Mike,

> I could imagine a check box in the dialog box like
> the one on the Spiral command, where if you check it
> you could then pick a twist angle at one end and then
> at the other.

I don't think that will work though - in the spiral command you're picking 2 different radius values - in the twist command you don't pick any radius values at all, because the distance of the particular point being deformed away from the axis is actually used as the radius of the helix.

Since it is a deformation that is being applied to objects, it's a bit of a different thing than drawing a single curve like the spiral.

Right now I can't see how 2 different twist angle would work - I mean the way twist works is that at the base of the twist axis you get 0 rotation there and it goes up to the full angle at the top. To do "ease in/ease out" doesn't really mean to change the start or end angle so much as it would mean changing how the transition between them would work...

Controlling the transition speed is not really the same thing as specifying 2 different angles...

- Michael

I would imagine it as having the center axis pole (Like when creating a helix) with a point that slides up and down the pole (Like the loft seam point alignment points). The sliding point would define a percentage of the angle at the placed point.

Hi Burr,

> The sliding point would define a percentage of the angle
> at the placed point.

Not sure that would work, because that's would be some kind of linear step that would probably not provide for a smooth gradual start or end.

Something that does "ease-in/ease-out" probably needs to be based on more like some kind of cubic blend that would start with only a little bit of "angular velocity" at the ends, and do more near the middle.

- Michael

A "bulge slider" for twist..... (well, 2. One for in and one for out)

Hi Burr,

> A "bulge slider" for twist..... (well, 2. One for in and one for out)

Maybe - if I can figure out a some kind of setup that has a scale factor in it that can be applied to it...

But I'm not sure yet how that would work.

- Michael

Hi Burr,

> A "bulge slider" for twist..... (well, 2. One for
> in and one for out)

The other problem with this is that it would probably mean adding in an extra step to the entire Twist command flow just so you could possibly tweak this value.

Right now the way it goes is you enter in a twist angle and once you do that you're all finished...

It doesn't seem very good to add in an entire extra stage just for twist acceleration tweaking.


I think it will be possible to add an option though to limit the twist to only happen inside of the axis range and when you do that there will be an automatic gradual ease-in/ease-out built in, here's an example twisting just the upper half of this thing:



Or here with twisting only the middle area:



That will allow for things like this - limited range twist with a twist axis between these 2 points:





- Michael

Hi PaQ, you were showing the Modo twist function with this screenshot:



But really that's a pretty good example of a fairly prodigious onslaught of parameters.

It's a pretty big goal for MoI's UI overall to avoid that kind of huge control panel - that seems to have something like 21 controls in it?

That certainly does give a lot of flexibility but it really leaves behind the overall "easy to use" aspect by quite a bit.

One thing that helps avoid that "all at once" type presentation in MoI is that stuff is broken down in stages, like the start and end axis are 2 different stages of the Twist command and once you finish those stages those pieces are done and don't have to see anything about them after that.

Sometimes then at the end of some commands there may be an "Adjust options" stage, but it can be kind of awkward to add in a separate options tweaking stage all the time for every single command, especially if the options are kind of hard to understand... That seems to me to be where having some ease-in/ease-out adjustment tools would kind of fall.

- Michael

Can't wait for this Michael G! Looks great!

Michael T.

Hello Michael,
flow and twist are pretty awesome!

For Controlling the twist why not use additional evaluating lines like the scaling rail in the sweep command. Just with 2 lines the first representing the length of the twist axis and evaluating the distance to the points of the second line get the amount of twisting. The farest point is used as 100%, touching the first line is 0%. Going to the opposite site reverses twisting :-)

Michael

< limited range twist
Very cool idea!

That look awesome Michael ! Can't wait to try it out :)

Hello Michael,

<< ... NURBS modeling can work well for building the kind of ideal smooth starting surface though.>>

Yes! So, is that will be possible to imagine a function to liquefied an objet; by example, a full cube (an ice cube) or one part of a cubic shape, may be on a plane or on others curves? As if, this objet flowed or melted, like water or oil? A thing to make drops or tears, to give the look of something watery. A sort of smooth-function (to apply a gravity force; a pression; a "fluidic" deformation on a objet)???

Hum?... I drop smooth effects dreams (I'm not technician).

I know well Amorphium (the first version of Coat3D), I have made a lot of sculptures with it (many Menhirs & Cromlechs too) it's very good to simulate all sort of old stones, very eroded; and full crazy things, as we can see now... It's a very good software for the Artists.

I asked me also, if the METABALLS function was specific to polygons applications, or if we could to make a such effect with NURBS?

Thank you.

Hi Michael,

> For Controlling the twist why not use additional evaluating
> lines like the scaling rail in the sweep command.

It's an interesting idea! But I'm not so sure about using distance to a 3D curve to control something totally different (the angle).

With the scaling rail in the sweep command, the scaling rail has a more direct relation to a distance used in the sweep.

Something like this would probably need more of a 2D curve editor that made a kind of graph of the twist function that you could edit - animation programs tend to have that kind graph editor in them but MoI does not currently have any equivalent of that set up.

- Michael

Hi Bard,

> So, is that will be possible to imagine a function to liquefied
> an objet; by example, a full cube (an ice cube) or one part
> of a cubic shape, may be on a plane or on others curves?
> As if, this objet flowed or melted, like water or oil?

You mean as a deformation tool to edit an existing object?

I don't really know of a method to produce that kind of an effect as deformation of an existing object.

You may need to use something more like a physics simulator type program to get some result like that to be automatically generated from an object.

I do want to add in a "cage deform" type mechanism that will let you edit a cage of points to squish the object around, but that's not the same thing as an "auto liquefy" function.

I'd recommend looking at some animation programs that have physics simulations in them as maybe a way to get that kind of an effect on polygon mesh geometry.


> I asked me also, if the METABALLS function was specific to
> polygons applications, or if we could to make a such effect
> with NURBS?

No, it's not really applicable to NURBS modeling. The way Metaballs work is that it actually creates something similar to a magnetic field, and then a boundary of that field is converted into triangles by subdividing it at some regular intervals.

Things that generate triangle output are not typically suitable for use with NURBS, generally NURBS surfaces need to be constructed out of a large rectangular UV grid of points and not a bunch of little triangle pieces with irregular topology.


Different modeling technologies tend to be stronger in particular areas - for the kind of stuff that you're mentioning here like metaballs and liquid like behavior you would want to be using a sub-d polygon modeling program (maybe one focused on animation) to make that kind of stuff.

MoI is stronger in completely different areas than that, with stuff like accurate construction, booleans, and a workflow that's more like drawing outline curves as compared to sculpting.

- Michael

I just posted a new v3 beta release to http://moi3d.com/beta.htm that has the new twist command in it (under Transform > Deform > Twist, next to Flow).

It will take me a bit here to gather up the release notes.

- Michael

Cool news :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJi-AOVuGvo
in english in the second part :)

Thank you Michael - It's like a mini-Christmas morning! :-)

Look! Look! The Flow tool no longer has the digressive rippled result when I try the helix on the path thing.

And I took a box, applied the new Twist deformer, using the corner points as the axis with the "within axis" box checked, and a twist of 2000 degrees.

I'm not really sure if this is a good result. It's pretty sweet looking, though. Is it supposed to be more "wound-up" in the middle than the edges?
Hmmm... I must experiment.

Looking good Michael!




Ooooooooooh... =-o I see!
The red and white striped thing on the left is without "Limit to Axis" and the one on the right is with "Limit to Axis" selected.

There is going to be great potential with this tool.



I'll be checking out the Projection Flow tool as well...

Also Michael: Is this a bug or a natural effect? - When I Twist an object where the joined surfaces it contains are various colors. The colors of each surface all together change back to the default coloration (loosing my color information).
When an object containing joined surfaces are all a single color, the color remains the same.

Candy sugar :)