I am new to MoI and have been trying out the different tools. One problem that I am having is the ability to "inset" the letter "O". The other letters of my name (John) inset easily. Does anyone know why this doesn't work? Or have a work around?





Thanks,

John Hoffman

Inset worked just fine, on the flat.

Failed to get an inset on a plain, curve flowed "O".
The "O" seem to be split up into several surfaces, and even the yellow highlight is incomplete.

Edit, In the Flow version, for OoPQ, First, ran inset for all 4 letters. Only the O and P inset, then re-ran inset for Q successfully, then re-ran inset for small o successfully.
Still see "shadows".

I assume you ran flow AFTER you ran inset. ???
(This would work for me)

Thanks!

Hi John, yeah it's probably easiest to run Inset before you do the flow rather than afterwards - that will give Inst a more simple object to work with.

I can't really tell just by looking at your screenshot, but is the O character possibly made up of a bunch of segments instead of only one single long segment? If it had multiple segments that would mean that the "side walls" of it would also be broken up into multiple faces instead of just one side wall face, and having multiple broken up faces like that instead of one big single face there is probably going to make things more difficult for Inset/offset type operations as well. Especially if the different pieces are nearly smooth to one another but just barely not - that will make surface offsets try to do an extension like it would need on sharp corners but things that intersect at a very shallow angle are more difficult for the surface intersector to handle.

Could you possibly post the 3DM model file? That would then help to take a look at the actual geometry.

For something like this where you're going to be doing a bunch of stuff to the text, it can help to simplify the initial text curves as much as possible, and the Rebuild command is the easiest way to do that:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#rebuild

At some point I'll be making the Text command automatically simplify what it makes by running Rebuild on it automatically, but at the moment it does not do that.

Rebuild can help do things like take a curve that is broken up into a whole bunch of separate segments nearly smooth to one another into one longer smooth segment, then when that is extruded it will be one single face instead of a lot of different faces and that can help simplify the job of other things like offset/inset after that.

- Michael

Michael,
It appears to me that the "O" is made up of one segment. If I select the face it is all selected with one click. Same goes for the outside curve and the inside curve. Attached is the file that I was working from. I believe it to be the original file, rather than my unsuccessful attempts to break the O and recombine it.

Also thanks for the tip on the rebuild. I think that will help with some of the problems that I was running into while trying to chamfer after trimming out an area (along with the text).

I don't want it to sound like I am struggling with your program, for the most part I find MoI very intuitive and a real pleasure to use and learn.

Thanks for you help,
John

Hi John, I've been looking at your O there and I haven't been able to quite figure out what the problem is.

It seems to be that the solid offsetter is what is getting messed up though - if you do just a regular offset (not inset), you can see that it makes a pretty messed up result.

Producing an offset is one stage of the inset command and so if offsetting is messed up, certainly inset is not going to work right either.

It doesn't look like it should be a difficult case, but one guess I have right now is that possibly even though the O is a single segment, it may have a very slight tangent deviation between the start and end where it comes together. That may be making the solid offsetter doing an attempt to make an extension of those edges when they are offset and it's probably getting confused with then trying to intersect those extensions that are just barely grazing each other.

Doing a Rebuild on the curves of the O before creating a solid from it and deforming it may help with this issue as well since it will also true up things that are nearly tangent into being exactly tangent and that will probably help avoid the problems with the offset trying to extend it later on.

That's still kind of a guess but I've seen some similar situations before that were running into that kind of problem with extensions on things with just very slightly non-tangent edges.

Do you happen to have the original object before it was deformed?

- Michael