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.

-

Thanks Burr! And actually most of the main new stuff was already mentioned above - Twist, bug fixes for Flow and new Projective option for Flow.

- Michael

Hi Danny, I don't know - I kind of don't like to make the command take up an extra step just for that purpose... It means that every use of the command will require and extra thing to do to finish it.

I guess it depends on whether you're in a kind of experimental mode or not - if you just want to twist something by a known angle the current method of just ending when the angle is entered keeps things nice and direct...

I'll have to think about that a bit more - I guess it's not really the kind of command that you'll need to be running really frequently so maybe an extra step is not too big of a deal. For some commands an extra step is really bad though - imagine for example if you had to do something special to accept a line after drawing the 2 points for it.

- Michael

Thanks Michael!
You've done an awesome work and MoI just keeps getting better and better!
The Projection Flow tool implementation is going to need a little time for me to figure out. :-)

BTW, would you consider some type of control or strength to how quickly the "Limit to Axis" acceleration transitions?




Twisted repetitively in different axes.

When I saw the new Twist command I immediately thought of Ice Cream. I'm normally a "metal" guy, but why not try it.

Ice cream was made by creating a sweep with two pointy ends, cut in half, twist, and deform. Rendered in KeyShot.

I agree with DannyT: "... 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"

It took some trial & error and lots of "undo" to get my result, and if I had the ability to try different values while the result was visible, as with fillet, then I think I could have achieved the exact result I wanted. As it was I said good enough for now. Twist is not something you would use often, but when you do, you want it right. I vote for adding the extra step.

Twist is a nice addition to the toolset - I'll experiment some more.

Ed Ferguson

Very appetizing...for summer :)

Ed! You modeled one of my most favorite things in the whole wide world! =-)

I agree. The Fillet has sort of an ability to get a visual grasp on how much of it's effect there will be.
It's hard to imagine effective angles in the mind's eye. If only there was a virtual "winding" control handle, or some type of dotted lines as a ghost image to help visualize the wanted twist.

Yeah Magic & Pilou - As it rendered I had a sudden urge to drive over to Dairy Queen, but I don't think they are open at 1AM :)

Maybe before posting on the KeyShot forum (they have some advertising professionals over there, so it better be good), I'll add two more cones with new flavors and maybe some sprinkles.

Ed

:-p.... (drooling)

Really cool addition !
Lots of possibilities with this new feature

Just five minutes work...

Hi Michael,

Sorry for the delay,

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

Not really, I think it's a kind of weight system used to describe tcb curves ? I remember having this kind of -1/+1 settings in lw graph editor long time ago.

Here's an illustration, with the preset settings (and the in/out value)




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

Not really, but you find the same kind of control on every fallof deformation type (linear, spherical, radial).

>> 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?

Not really, the main settings are about the fallof position, start, end, direction ... basically you have replace this in MoI by requiring the user to draw his twist axe, while modo create it on the fly when you fire the command.

>> 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.

Yup it's off course up to you to decide, I'm probably a bit used to have this fallof control , so when I saw the new twist command I was immediatly thinking about it. I will easily see it has a little drop menu with some presets, like the 'Ends' option you have in the sweep command.


Now as a more general discussion, I'm wondering if the way modo manage deformation will somehow fit MoI philosophy. As I told you Modo combine micro fonctions to create commands. For example the twist is 'just' a rotation with a linear fallof along an axe. Maybe for future version of MoI, splitting functions in small steps like that can help to avoid having thousand of commands ... well ... just thinking loud :)

Cheers.

PaQ,

You could try in MoI, to enable "Limit to Axis", place the start of the twist point at the bottom and place the top point maybe at almost twice the height above the object.
You'll get more twist action at the top, because the other end of the eased twist is in the aether.