A new March 29th 2007 beta is now available from the download page.

New stuff:

New "scaling rail" option for sweep. You can now pick an additional guide curve for sweeps by pushing the new "Pick scaling rail" button. The scaling rail gives the opportunity to further control the shaping of the profiles as they travel along the rail. For a 2 rail sweep the scaling rail should run down the center line of the sweep and basically acts as a 3rd rail. Each profile is stretched vertically so that it fits against the scaling rail. For a 1-rail sweep the scaling rail should run along one side of the central rail and allows you to add bumps or flared ends to a tube-like shape by using one additional guide curve instead of many different profiles which would have been previously required for such shapes.

New "preserve tangent" mode for 2-rail sweep. If you have all open planar profiles that share a common end tangent and are on parallel planes, there is a new "preserve tangent" checkbox that can be enabled which will perform the sweep with a different method that guarantees that all in-between profiles will continue to be on the same set of parallel planes and will maintain the end tangent for all created in-between profiles. This is useful when attempting to create a 2 rail sweep that you want to mirror later on without leaving a crease down the mirror line. The normal 2 rail sweep does not work well for this situation due to the rotations of the profiles as endpoints slide along the rails.

There is now a new closed option for loft.

Made a midpoint object snap available on arc curves.

Updated ellipse command, there are now width and height input boxes.

Update curve offset - planar curves will now always offset within their own plane. Also offset will now join together touching curve segments automatically, it is not necessary to join them manually. Together these changes allow for offseting the selected edges of a box to get a trimmed smaller or extended larger rectangle.

Fixed bug in reading .3dm files where block definitions were read as ordinary objects, making extra objects appear.

Updated Join and Separate so that the results are selected when the command finishes.

Blend, Loft, and Sweep can now be canceled if they are taking a long time to complete.

Update blend and loft - instead of being sensitive to the end which is picked for matching up open curve with one another, an automatic calculation is always done and you can now flip the direction of any section by clicking on the section (either the blend edge or the loft curve).

Updated Blend - added a slider for adjusting the bulge factor of the blend.

Update fillet - when using blend shapes for fillets, there is now a "Bulge" slider that you can use to tweak the shape.

Surface blending has been completely rewritten and generates much better results.

Various bug fixes...

Spanish translation ready

The "bulge" option works very very fine. I love it!!! :-)

German strings available.

MfG
sk2k

Hi Tony, one thing I forgot to mention - it is now possible to set the colors for the selection inside of moi.ini, if you want to mess around with them for your alternate UI skin.

[View]
LineUnselectedColor=0,0,0
LineSelectedColor=255,255,32
SurfaceUnselectedColor=255,255,255
SurfaceUnselectedTransitionColor=255,255,208
SurfaceSelectedTransitionColor=255,255,128
SurfaceSelectedColor=239,239,0
TextColor=51,51,51

This handles the selection colors for everything except for points - right now the selection color for points is baked into the point image, so to tweak those you have to edit Point_selected.png, Point_transitionfromselected.png, and Point_transitiontoselected.png

- Michael

I'm repeating myself every new beta but once again, it looks great.

Just one question. For the new bulge function, is it normal that I can not move the slider under a value of 0.25 but I can type a lower value manually ???

Hi Bernard,

> Just one question. For the new bulge function, is it normal that I can not
> move the slider under a value of 0.25 but I can type a lower value manually ???

Yup, this is normal. I tried to pick what I figured was a pretty reasonable range for the slider for most normal tweaking purposes, but allow you to enter a value outside of that range if you wish.

You can even put in a negative number (try something like -3) to get a weird inverse blend...

- Michael

OK, thanks !

Like with the "boolean release" a few weeks ago, a few new tools or a few more options for existing ones open a world of possibilities ! ;-)
Well done Michael !

Thanks!

Yeah, there haven't really been any totally new tools for a while now (since Array Dir?), instead I've been focused on adding more options and just more power to the existing toolset.

But I think the next release will have a couple of brand new tools.

There won't be too many more beta releases, maybe 2 or 3 more. Things are getting pretty close to a V1 release now.

I originally wanted to wrap up V1 by the end of March, but it kind of slipped away from me a bit...

- Michael

>> I originally wanted to wrap up V1 by the end of March, but it kind of slipped away from me a bit...

Well, if it's OK for you, I think it's OK for most users... The money will remain in our wallets for a longer period... ;-)))
But as you know, there are people ready to donate if it's really necessary ! Hehe

As mentioned earlier, unless there's some kind of earthquake or a thunderstorm devastating everything here you can count me amongst your customers when you will release V.1. Whenever it is.

And brand new tools in the coming beta(s) ! Yum ! ;-)

I've updated release notes and page with scripts... I think there is a couple of useful info... and Michael can look at progress before releasing V1 and "quoting" a price... hehe..

Petr

>>...unless there's some kind of earthquake or a thunderstorm
>>devastating everything here...

Hi Bernard, I guess the decission-making process of the EU is pretty close... hehe... -Petr

And another great update, wow. Thank you so much yet again Michael :) gonna try it out first thing tomorrow morning.

/ Magnus

Thanks Magnus - this also fixes the "extra objects" bug you reported the day before yesterday.

- Michael

> Update blend and loft - instead of being sensitive to the end which is picked
> for matching up open curve with one another, an automatic calculation is
> always done and you can now flip the direction of any section by clicking
> on the section (either the blend edge or the loft curve).

One note on the above - actually _curve_ blending still pays attention to which end you click near.

It's surface blending (between edge curves) that no longer pays attention to the clicked end, it does an automatic matching calculation there now. If it was incorrectly calculated (which can happen if your surfaces are pointing kind of at odd angles away from each other but shouldn't happen typically), you can click on the edge while still inside of the blend command to flip it.

- Michael

You're welcome :) i read in this thread and in the other one i started and saw you fixed it real fast, it must been a minor issue like changing a 1 to a 0 or something like that.

/ Magnus

Yeah it was just a couple of more lines of code to check if the object was marked as a block definition object.

- Michael

Bulge
What is the nature of the object with bulge 10?
Is it sustainable?

> But does exist somewhere the old option of "crossing" from opositite
> position of picking point or this function is desapeared?

Hi Pilou, a crossed surface intersects itself, normally you should try to avoid creating surfaces that intersect themselves because they won't work well with other commands later on that involve intersections such as booleans or fillets.

But if you do want to create one, it is still possible - before you pick "Done" to finish the command, move your mouse into the viewport and click on one of the section curves. This will flip it and should create a crossed surface.

This works for both loft and blend - each click on any of the section curves before you exit the command will flip the direction of that section curve.

- Michael