I hear we may see some in V3? I am a Rhino user and need a good clean variable radius surface fillet.

Thanks!
Jeff

Hi Jeff, yup I do plan on working on variable radius fillets in v3, but are you talking about a surface/surface filleter in particular as opposed to an edge-based one?

I'm not sure yet if variable radius will be for edge based fillets only or not - it may be more difficult to do a UI for defining the radius values on a surface/surface one.

- Michael

Michael,

Surface to surface would be preferable. Rhino will do some fairly decent edge based solid fillets now, not great but fair.

Thanks!

Hi Jeff - how would you expect the UI for a surface/surface variable radius fillet to work?

With the edge-based one it should be possible to click on spots on the edge to indicate the radius at a particular point. With a surface/surface one there isn't really an equivalent existing clickable thing like that to control it with.

So because of that I think a surface/surface variable radius fillet is probably going to be difficult to design well as compared to an edge based one - that's why probably an edge based one will be a focus first and a surface/surface one of this type may not make it into MoI v3.

- Michael

Michael,

The Rhino UI works pretty well, but the results are crummy. Here is a short video: http://screencast.com/t/kP1DnT6ht

Thanks for your consideration!

Best,
Jeff

Hi Jeff, so I guess in Rhino the 2 surfaces for variable radius filleting must actually intersect one another, is that correct? That's not required in regular constant radius surface/surface filleting.

But I guess requiring that makes it easier to build a UI based off of the intersection curve.

However, MoI still does not even have an edge-based variable radius fillet. I expect to work on an edge-based variable radius fillet first and I'm not sure if a surface/surface variant will be completed in the v3 time frame or not.

- Michael

Michael,

Rhino DOES require the surfaces to touch, and I guess that' for the UI but I never thought of it like that, bet you're right. I wished that wasn't the case as some of my stuff doesn't or can't touch/intersect, or it's a pain to make it touch.

What is the time frame of your V3 build? And, do you have a BETA program like Rhino?

Thanks Michael!

Hi Jeff, yeah I'm not sure how the UI would be done very easily with surfaces that do not touch one another.

> What is the time frame of your V3 build? And, do you have a
> BETA program like Rhino?

Yeah the MoI v3 beta is in progress right now:
http://moi3d.com/beta.htm

I don't have any exact time frame for when v3 will be completed, my vague guess at the moment would be something like 8 to 10 months from now.

- Michael

Hi Micheal,

This would be a great feature.
I would like to offer a suggested UI for the surface to surface.

1) Select the surfaces you wish to fillet that do not touch. If they touch then use the edge technique you explained above.

2) The command would allow you to determine how many radii change points you need. 2 points would be the default. Point A is the start and point B is the end of the fillet.

3) For every radii point created there are 2 input fields:
a. Radius: Define the Radius of fillet at this point
b. Percentage: Define the percentage of distance past point A where you want the fillet radius to change size.

Also allow for a 0 radius value.

Thanks

Hi yakas - the problem with that kind of interface where it's primarily a big list of numeric values and not really any kind of graphical or mouse related input just does not really fit in very well with much of the other UI strategy in other places in MoI.

Maybe it's the only way to make something like that work, but I would probably hestitate for quite a while trying to think of some other ways that would possibly fit in better before adopting something like that.

So again because of that I probably would expect to have an edge-based method first, and maybe not a surface-surface variable radius method at least initially.

I'll also probably be limited in what I can do depending on what kind of input the geometry library function that does variable radius fillets expects to receive. I'm not sure if how the library works may constrain what kinds of things are possible in the UI as well (like if a 0 radius input is allowed or not), but it might.

- Michael