hahah cool I like it.

Peace,
Rich_Art. ;-)

Hi Mike, that's awesome that you didn't plan all those details at first but just let things come together! That's been a big goal for MoI to give you that kind of feeling that you can make stuff happen pretty quickly.

And yup, definitely the deformation tools open up a lot of new possibilities, I'm glad that you're putting them to some good use! :)

- Michael

Hi MagicMike,

I second Pilou, ROYAL! Impressive work again and very creative, Bravo!

I'd love to see a tutorial on this one, especially the details of hardware of course. Can we dream...

Awsome work,
Felix

MagicMike,

I've downloaded the zip file out of curiosity and to see if I could figure out how you did some of the pieces and I realised that most objects are joint surfaces, is that on purpose? Could this be the cause of your difficulties with the rendering (flip normals amoung others)?

I can see some advantages of using joined surfaces but could this cause difficulties down the line?

Sorry for all these questions, you just happen to hit my curiosity button!

Thanks,
Felix

After the Vacuum cleaner, this great complex mechanical WC.
I ask me if we couldn't to join the both, for our individual daily use; a ThroneVaccum or VacuumThrone.

I like this Throne; by Principle or Prince, nobody works enough on the seat that everybody uses all the days during all his life. It will be nice in my Dining room, may be also in my library where I don't have a lack of paper.

Truely awesome!

Thanks guys!!! :-)

Burr - I'd settle for a MoI luau! mmmmm... roast pigs and hula girls!

Felix - (Michael, could you shed any light on this subject?) - I pretty much join surfaces to make the whole of the combined surface a little easier to select and work with, but yes, it makes rendering a little nicer when there are no gaps. MoI will "weld" together the edges.
Are there any noted advantages on your part when the surfaces are left intact? I'm always open to learning the nuances of other peoples MoI proficiencies.
You bring up a good point too: Is there a way to control the direction of the normals when exporting an .obj to a stand-alone renderer like Kerkythea.
Is that what the non-UI command "Flip" does?

Bard - I like that! I did have a quick thought to include a guilded metal holder for a drink cups and other things, but when one brings the dining room and bathroom too close together, one runs the risk of creating a human feedback-loop.
(eew... did I write that?)

I think I might make a small tut or two for some of the elements on the handle. But the majority of the elements are actually just Revolved profiles.
The handle, the tank wall escutcheons and the flow action on the weight might be good to show.

Hi Mike,

> I pretty much join surfaces to make the whole of the
> combined surface a little easier to select and work with,
> but yes, it makes rendering a little nicer when there are
> no gaps. MoI will "weld" together the edges.

Yup, especially for exporting to a rendering program you want to join together surfaces instead of having them just be totally separate surfaces sitting next to one another. When they are actually joined together then the mesh will be generated with knowledge of that join and the mesher will do extra work to ensure that there is a common shared vertex structure along that edge. If they get meshed totally separately with no knowledge of the connection between them then there can be different vertex structures there and that tends to make for little tiny cracks.

But if I understood correctly, the question was more like "why do you have joined surfaces instead of solids"?

A solid is a bunch of joined surfaces where every single edge is joined to another one, making a completely closed skin that defines a volume.


> Are there any noted advantages on your part when the
> surfaces are left intact?

I think he was thinking of making a solid, not of leaving them as separate individual surfaces?


> You bring up a good point too: Is there a way to control the
> direction of the normals when exporting an .obj to a stand-alone
> renderer like Kerkythea.

That's one of the advantages of making things into a solid instead of leaving any open edges - a solid will automatically have its normals oriented to point towards the outside of the volume. If you have a joined surface that has some unjoined edges within it somewhere (meaning it does not define a volume), then the normals are not oriented automatically in any special way and the orientation will depend on other factors like if you happened to draw some of the original curves in a clockwise or counterclockwise direction.


> Is that what the non-UI command "Flip" does?

Yes, for a non-solid joined surface you can use the Flip command on it to reverse its positive surface normal direction and that will also reverse the direction of the mesh normals that are generated from the surface.


You don't have to make things into solids, but if it's not too much work to do it on any particular model it can be a good idea because then the final mesh that you generate will automatically have outward pointing normals. Also it can be kind of convenient in general to work more with solids since the boolean commands are more focused on working with solids - they decide which pieces to keep and which pieces to discard based on which volume the pieces are located in. So in some cases if you don't have a volume you may need to use Trim to cut it up rather than using booleans. Booleans are kind of like a "high level" version of trim that wraps up doing a Trim + removing particular pieces + joining all as a kind of batch operation so they're kind of more convenient to be able to use when possible instead of doing those steps manually.

But on the other hand it's not necessarily an "error" to have a joined surface instead of a solid either - if it would take too much work to construct the missing pieces to make it a finished up solid then that can outweigh the convenience factor that working with a finished solid would give...

It also depends on what you're doing with your models as well though, because for some kinds of uses like generating 3D printed physical parts, it is mandatory to have a solid, but for just rendering it's not.


re: rendering normals - most of the time with a renderer it is possible to set materials to be "double sided" and once you do that it won't really make any difference which side happens to be the positive surface normal side. So it can be easiest to just set that one property in the render material and then not worry about normals any more after that at all.


- Michael

MagicMike,

I was always trying to make "scrolls" as solid and failed. This morning, following your example and forgetting about solid, which I wont need anyway afterwards, I finally managed to create one that I like as a joint surface. I think Michael said something about adjacent surfaces that are self-intersecting or pretty close can causes booleans to fail.

The main reasons I prefer to work with solid are: yes it's easier to select and edit as a single object, though a joint surface is also a single object and I'm sure a solid is leak tight, no gap and no fliped normals. For some type of work like say 3D printing, I believe it's necessary to have leak tight objects but I'm sure for many other type of work, tiny gap may pretty well be insignificant.

I was also thinking about adding SubD effect (outside of Moi of course) like say a small amount of mesh displacement to simulate chisel marks or whatever especially for things like leafs and floral motifs. Now that I've found an add-on that will make retopology much easier, for me at least, I can see myself doing much more then just adding a little displacement modifier. But but but, Moi Moi Moi, I just love it and I want to use it as much as possible before going out, ideally, only for rendering. So, if joint surfaces make my life easier, why not.

Again Mike, the work you do is just great, keep them coming.

Thanks,
Felix

<<< and sports an illegal 15 liters per flush!
yes but you can put inside some little bricks inside for come back in the legacy :D

Hi Michael,

You can tell that I was introduced to 3D design through SketchUp. ;-)
I see what you mean. I'm tending to gear surface creation towards rendering, which looks at things superficially.

It's just a fun to create the whole shape of objects and the inner-workings of a model, and there are times when that's the goal of a design, but there's usually a cost with memory and manipulation speed associated.
I also run into problems when trying to give thickness to surfaces to make thin-walled elements. The same type of problems associated with fillet where sharp angles, space constraints and funny edges can trip up the Shell and Offset commands.

I'm hoping the normals issue is what gives me odd-colored or odd-reflective objects in my Kerkythea renderings. Must be either that or some type of object duplication, as it will produce the same error in different rendering modes.
MoI cannot currently show the direction of the normals, but if I could find the switch in Kerkythea that enables both sides, that would not be an issue. I see where you can choose both sides in the emission parameter but I have the feeling that Kerhythea enables both sides to start with.
...challenge.

On the note of surface matching: ;-)
So! Do you think we may see a slightly enhanced Blend tool someday?
One that will blend across the edges containing multiple curve segments and even intersections?
One that will blend between not only two, but 3 or 4 individual edges with options for tangent types on each edge?
Sorry, thought I'd plug that one again. Seems to be something I end up wishing for at some point in every model.

Thanks for the good explanation on solids and open surfaces!

Pilou... if what makes the brick are legal, then yes. ;-)
I hate these new toilets that use less water. The just never flush right.
Here in north Florida we are sitting on an aquifer with 3000 tera-liters of an endless supply of water. Sure it makes sense for most of the country that gets their water from reservoirs, but here, conserving water is like making soup to stretch a piece of meat while dining at an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Felix... I get what you were talking about. I'll often make both solid and open surfaces without regard to which is which.
But I imagine if you make the open surface, you can Flow it easier - then when you are done with distortions you can find ways to make the remaining object a solid but constructing final surfaces. Not an easy task sometimes.

Thanks Michael for your explanation.

I still don't understand why some combination of solids wont union, event worst, in some cases it goes bazurk, I know you need a file and here it is.

It's just a test I did trying to find something that wont union and I got even better, union went bazurk on me. Basically, I created a sphere and used a plain circle to create a ring of sphere that union without problem. Then I copied the first ring and I put a few on the outside of the first ring almost randomly. I tried to union all 6 rings together and voila! A joint surface was created and a bunch of unjoined surfaces where created as well but I tried to join this result and it worked, creating a single object but you'll see as well that some shere have lost some part of there skin sort of speak.

Since it's not the first time I obtain a similar result, I'd like to know if there a way to at least get a correct joined surface, by this I mean without lost of some part of the original surface. Though I think I could create a good joined surface in this particular case I would appreciate this a lot since I would use this method to create the central part of flowers with a few hundred tiny sphere disposed in spiral on the surface of a dome for example, sorry I don't know the name in english.

Thanks,
Felix

Hi Mike,

> I'm hoping the normals issue is what gives me odd-colored
> or odd-reflective objects in my Kerkythea renderings.

Maybe, but it doesn't really sound like it...

Can you maybe prepare an example file that has just the one problem object in it so I could take a look and try to give you a suggestion?


> So! Do you think we may see a slightly enhanced Blend tool someday?

Yup, I want to do an overhaul of surface blend at some point here in v3, specifically to allow a longer chain of edges on either side of the blend instead of only 1-to-1 like it does currently.

- Michael

Hi Felix - so that boolean problem looks like a bug, something is getting mangled in the calculation of the intersection curves between the pieces. I'll put it on my list to investigate.

But it also looks like a contributing factor is the relatively small size of the objects - smaller sized objects can tend to make the booleans job harder - I'd suggest building your objects to be around a factor of 10 larger in size instead of so small.

For example here I've attached a version of your file and all I did was scale it up by a factor of 10 times in size and move them closer to the origin and it seems to boolean together ok now.

It can tend to confuse the booleans when you have small features which start to approach the 0.001 fitting tolerance, it will try to do things like combine intersections together that are within that distance of each other and that can sometimes have a tendency to disrupt the boolean process, something like trim loops get portions of them collapsed down and make an invalid loop.

In your original file there you've got spheres that have a radius of 0.06 inches - basically try to avoid making individual features which are small enough that they're measured in hundredths, try building things at more around 10 times larger than that at a minimum and you'll probably avoid a lot of problems.

- Michael

GREAT SCOTT, MICHAEL! - I think I figured it out!

I created this render scene with three versions of the lid and the tank of the toilet model.
The upright one is the original and the first prone one (left on bottom) is a copy of the upright one.
The lid object at the top of the one on the right has had the normals reversed with the non-UI "Flip" command.
A single porcelain type material was applied to everything.

As you can see from these pics, If I'm not mistaken (the last image has a darker gamma applied): the lid object on the top of the right prone model is the same color as the rest of the tank model.
The original lid objects are not only discolored, but have a different reflection quality.




Michael, I think you may know right off, but just in case, I provided a .3dm and .obj file inside "objects_normals_test_01.zip".

Okay, it seems obvious. With Kerkythea, normal orientation counts.
So I have to find one of two solutions. Either 1) I have to find out how to get Kerkythea to see each side as the same front side and apply the materials likewise,
or 2) I would like to ask you to consider a non-UI command for a future release that could show a special color to the back-side of the surface to indicate it's normal orientation.
It would probably have to be done on the direct-x level, but would give users a special-case way to see which objects need to have the "Flip" command applied.


Oh, and now you have me anxious for the future enhancement of the Blend tool. =-)

Thanks.

TARNATIONS! I dug fer gold and got silver!



You can see Kerky give my backside a woopin!
Other than exporting an .obj, importing it to Kerky, then running one material to test for reverse normals... there's no way to tell in MoI, no?

One good place to put an indicator could be the mesh exporter dialog in MoI. When you go to make your meshes, maybe ones with a different outline color could represent the backsides...


Well, at least I know now what to look for.

Hi Mike, hmm that seems a bit unusual that backfacing or not would alter the reflectivity in that way - I wonder if that's actually a bug in Kerkythea.


> 2) I would like to ask you to consider a non-UI command
> for a future release that could show a special color to the
> back-side of the surface to indicate it's normal orientation.

Yup, this is something that I already have wanted to do, it's just like everything else, hard to find the time to do it with also a lot of other things on the list as well...

I haven't quite figured out if it should be just built in to the export process or whether it could be part of some group of analysis commands or what quite yet.

- Michael

Hi Mike,

> Other than exporting an .obj, importing it to Kerky, then
> running one material to test for reverse normals... there's
> no way to tell in MoI, no?

Well, if you make solids then they'll be pointing towards the outside of the solid.

But yeah there's not really much in MoI that is sensitive to the normal direction, I've taken some pains not to make very much stuff dependent on it. About the only thing I can think of is if you do a surface offset it will go along the positive normal direction as long as the Flip checkbox inside that command is not turned on.

- Michael

Thanks, Michael.

True... that sounds like a good thing to try.