Hi. It's nice to know that you could actually talk to the developer in this forum.
It's much like the one they have at Luxology. In others all you could do is guess.
You'll wonder why it's so difficult to answer simple questions. Instead of staying
with the app you end up looking for alternatives.

I just would like to know if Rhino's network surface tool is in the pipeline. Some call it
Gordon surface. Pardon me if this is already asked in the past threads.

Well I'm amazed how Michael manages to find as much time as he does to answer all of our questions. I suspect there is really a huge support team based somewhere in India that he employs to answer all our questions.

Although the people here are still quite friendly for now. When MoI is finally released, I'm sure the atmosphere will start to change. The gentle and slightly apologetic questions will turn into outright demands. :)

HOY GIBSON! GIVE US NETWORK SURFACES! HOW THE HELL AM I SUPPOSED TO EARN A LIVING WITHOUT NETWORK SURfACES!!!? FFS!!


But I'll still love you, Michael!


ps. I don't even know what a network surface is! :)

> I just would like to know if Rhino's network surface tool is in the pipeline.

Yup, I'm intending to add this in pretty soon.

- Michael

Nice, so i can throw Ayam away. :) I used it for gordon surfaces but it was a bit complicated to use.

MfG
sk2k

> HOY GIBSON! GIVE US NETWORK SURFACES! HOW THE HELL AM
> I SUPPOSED TO EARN A LIVING WITHOUT NETWORK SURfACES!!!? FFS!!

Ha :) I guess that's the point where I'm supposed to outsource the support! :)

- Michael

Gordon Surfaces are ruled surfaces defined by curves linked like this one
( a sort of sweep with any number of rails :)

Woah cool! Thanks for the info, Frenchy!. I think they would make my life much easier!.


MICHAEL!!! WE WANT GORDON SURFACES!!




Oh I'm kidding! :)

Seriously though, MoI is the best modeler available now. So anything else added is just a bonus for me. But do Gordon Surfaces normally support multiple profiles too?

< But do Gordon Surfaces normally support multiple profiles too
I believe yes :)

I don't know how you could mold this kind of shape with the current tools.
You could see these kinds of curves in car bodies when modeling one.
I appreciate the answers. I just think that MOI having this feature nearly
completes it.

Moi has not yet Gordon !

And yes Gordon can have some profils :)



PS
> don't know how you could mold this kind of shape with the current tools.

You can modelize yet forms show above (futurist car)
Select the 3 blue curves, and White curves as rail 1, and violet curve as rail 2!

Hi blenddoodler,

> I don't know how you could mold this kind of shape with the current tools.

You can use a sweep with 2 rails to construct that kind of a shape with the current tools. To do it, select the section curves and then run Construct/Sweep, then select the 2 other curves as the guide rails.

The profiles will be swept along the guide rails to create a surface.

Let me know if you want more info on how to work it.

- Michael

Hihi I have made it during your post :)

Okay, how about being able to split curves? In AutoCAD it's called "break" command with the "F" option. Which means after invoking 'break', it asks for the first pick point along any point on the curve, or it may be outside of it. The second pick point will be the extent of the part of the curve intended to be cut out. The option 'F' just meant that the second point is the same as the first pick point. In short, it splits the curve in two. Rhino has a straightforward break feature and it's called exactly what it does -- "split", in which you can split a curve in any number of divisions. If you look at the mousewire in the previous post, three curves that are supposed to form one smoothed curve were done separately. Obviously, this is not exactly an accurate way to do it. Am I making sense?

Hi blenddooler - the equivalent of this in MoI is Edit/Trim.

Select your curve you want to cut into pieces. Now run Edit/Trim.

At this point, you can either select any other objects that you want to slice the curve with, or push the "Add trim points" in the options area, which will let you pick slicing points on the curve with your mouse.

When you have finished picking cutting points push "Done" (or push enter or right-click in a viewport).

Then there is one more stage - this is where you pick which pieces you want to discard or keep. If you want to keep everything, push "Done" (or enter/right-click) and all pieces will be kept which is the equivalent of Rhino's Split command.

- Michael

Okay, one last question for now. If you look at the mirrored half of the mouse in my second post, the joined surfaces aren't exactly tangent, thus have kink. Any suggestion how you could smooth it in MOI?

Thanks for the replies. I'll have to learn MOI in its entirety before asking any more questions. I'll be back.

MoI does not yet have an easy way to edit surfaces later on to smooth them with one another.

You can still get smooth results, but you have to make sure that your curves are set up before your sweep so that they produce results that don't have a crease.

Usualy this means carefully placing the second control point inside from the end of the curve, which controls the tangent direction at the end of the curve.

Also, sometimes it is easier to get a smooth result by setting up the sweep using a full curve (mirror and join the profiles first) for all the profiles instead of doing it in pieces, then your result is generated all in one shot instead of mirroring it.

If you would like to post the curves here, I could show you how you would tweak them to produce smoother results.

- Michael

Hi Michael. Yes, you'll have smooth surface results if your curves are set up properly even if you apply mirror later on. Or you could forego mirroring and draw the whole curves. The advantage of mirroring is that tweaking is less painful in that you only have to deal with half of the object especially the parts that are farther away from the mirror line. In a way I think this is another workflow alternative to have: draw your curves haphazardly then mirror or edit the curves with tools such as join, match curve or surface tangent, etc.

You mentioned joining curves. I tried it, how do you smooth out that kink where the the two curves meet?

> In a way I think this is another workflow alternative to have: draw your curves
> haphazardly then mirror or edit the curves with tools such as join, match curve
> or surface tangent, etc.

Yes, certainly this is good to have as another option - I expect to add this type of "Match" functionality in a future version. But since MoI V1 won't have it this workflow alternative won't work in MoI for the time being.


> I tried it, how do you smooth out that kink where the the two curves meet?

For this you can turn on control points, select the point at that juncture and delete it.

But what I was really thinking of was join it after you have already carefully drawn it so the tangents of the pieces align.

- Michael

Yes, MOI's sweep tool actually does the job for these types of shapes. I did the whole curve tangency thing by joining the mirrored halfs of the curves, deleted the points at the juncture, cut them again in half and there you go a smoother surface result. If you want it smoother at the mirror line you might want to add more profiles like in the nose of the mouse. I don't know if this is precise. But I'm still experimenting.

Just a quick note - if you want to tweak those curves, the sweep should dynamically update.

But the mirrored part won't update automatically - this is because history updating is not turned on by default for the results of mirroring. Some operations (right now including all transforms) don't have updating turned on by default because it can sometimes be confusing for doing basic things when a bunch of other stuff changes.

However, you can turn on updating for the mirroring - to do this, select the mirrored half, and run Edit/History and choose "Enable update" - once you have done that, if you edit one of those curves it will update the sweep, which will then in turn update the mirrored part.

Here is a tutorial that I wrote earlier on making a Japanese bath tub which uses a similar half-edit type thing: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=402.9


Also, I'm not certain but I think you can still get creases with the sweep that you're doing there, because there will be a type of rotational twist happen in between the profiles as the ends move along the rails at sort of slightly different speeds.

The way you can absolutely guarantee that you will have a perfectly smooth result is to use mirrored+joined profiles, and instead of splitting the profile, keep it intact and mirror that side rail over to the other side and use that as the second rail instead of the central rail. When doing it that way the profiles will not have rotation happen to them since the rails are mirror images of each other and points match up perfectly between them with no "slanting" as the sweep moves along.

- Michael