Hi Michael

I've been thinking about a new command I'd love to see in MoI. It's related to the Offset and Inset commands, but different.



Here would be the effect if used on the outer surfaces of the solid in the middle of the sphere (with the top and bottom surfaces not selected, so they don't get shrunk).

Currently the only way I know of doing this operation is manually. But it's one of those things that I do (often multiple times) on pretty much every model I make :P

It's similar to the Inset command, however it doesn't do an offset into the surface first - eg. it doesn't have a "border" around the inset piece.

Hope that makes sense :)

Why do I get premonitions of Death-Star models suddenly becoming popular, after this command is implemented? :)
BTW I also think it would be a nice time saver

Hi NightCabbage - it looks like it is similar enough to Inset that it could be possible to have it actually handled by Inset rather than as a separate command?

It is possible in inset to control the border thickness separately from the inset depth, by checking the "Use separate height" option.

So I think what you would want would be to have a 0 sized thickness for the border but then set "Use separate height" and specify a non-zero height/inset depth type value, is that correct?

Right now I think that it does not think that a zero thickness is a valid value and just bails out, but would that combination of 0 thickness + "Use separate height" height set give you the result you are looking for there?

- Michael

Hi NightCabbage, also the way you could achieve this right now (if the operations actually don't make bad results...) would be to take your middle section there as its own individual solid slab, and select the top and bottom faces and run Shell on that.

That will build a hollowed out result like this:





And the ring that remains there is the material that you want to have removed, so paste back in the original shape (do a ctrl+c before doing the shell above), so you've got both the original and the shelled one at the same time like this:



You can then select the original one and do boolean difference and select the ring one as the piece to remove.

- Michael

Hey Michael

Thanks for the tip! That looks a bit easier than my current method!

I'd still really love a command for this type of operation though ;)

Hi mir4ea, the Inset command is basically set up to generate a shape that has a border around it - if you want something with a 0 border width that would then be just a regular offset, use Offset or Shell for doing something like that rather than Inset.

Some previous discussion here:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5508.11

- Michael