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 :)

Thanks Michael! will check it out :)

-

Hi Mike,

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

Yup, that bug with curve-to-curve flow has been fixed up in this version.

There was also a bug in surface-to-surface flow that caused a very slight bumpy-ness in a few situations and that's also been tuned up as well.

Also Flow now pays attention to the location where you click and will match them up, flipping and/or swapping UV directions as needed, as described here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4442.24

There are 8 different zones to click on to do the matching - you should click on an edge near to one side of the edge - close to the corner but not exactly on the corner because which side of the corner you click on is also significant.

There's also a new option for Flow to flip the surface normal to the opposite side, and also the Projective option can be enabled in surface to surface flow before you pick the target surface. The Projective option for Flow works like this:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4471.15
Instead of mapping from one entire surface stretching it to the same relation in the other surface, it instead beams the object on like a movie projector, shooting rays out from the base plane's normal. It should be useful for applying an object more like a decal to a localized area of another one rather than stretching it like a pattern across the whole surface like the other Flow mode does.


> Is it supposed to be more "wound-up" in the middle than the edges?

Yup, it is if you have "Limit to axis" checked - that makes only the region of the object on the inside of the axis line to be twisted and in order for the twist to match up smoothly with any other part of the object outside of that zone, the twist will gradually drop off in angular speed as it goes towards the end.

Otherwise it would not be a smooth transition from the non-twisting part to the twisting part.

You can also enable that option though even if you are twisting the entire object, if you actually want that ease-in/ease-out type effect even though you are really twisting the whole thing.


But basically that gradual acceleration of the twist at the ends of the axis is what allows for twisting just the middle portion of something like this to work properly:









A totally uniform twist would not work properly for that kind of limited range thing (for something like MoI which is constructing an accurate representation of the twist function itself, not just munging points around like a polygon modeling program would be), because there would be a discontinuity in the twisting where the constant angular motion dropped to 0 all at once.


> 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).

That's a bug, thanks for mentioning it - looks like the same thing happens to Flow as well, I'll take a look and see about getting it fixed up for the next beta.


- Michael

Hi Michael,

What would be nice is a ghost preview of the twist once you enter a twist angle.

-

Hi Danny,

> What would be nice is a ghost preview of the twist
> once you enter a twist angle.

When would that show up though? Right now when you enter in a twist angle the twist command is all finished...

Doing some kind of preview would mean something like extending the twist command to have an extra stage in it, so you'd have to do another action to finish it.

- Michael

Super Michael... I'll download it tonight after work. :-) Thanks for the update.

@Magic
Cool examples.

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

I guess I won't have the release notes prepared until tomorrow sometime.

- Michael

Sweet dreams. Thanks!!!!

Hi Michael,

> Doing some kind of preview would mean something like
> extending the twist command to have an extra stage in
> it, so you'd have to do another action to finish it.

Yep, that's right, I noticed as I was using the twist command that I'd enter an angle and thought, 'nope, that's not what I want......undo and enter another value....not quite...undo and enter another angle.
Extending the command with a preview would be pretty natural as you do with filleting, there are no guide curves like the other commands that you can tweak afterwards because they have history attached to get the desired result.

-