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
