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

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

Blending adjusts the scaling of control points on either half of the blend.

In that case with a rather large scale factor (points are spaced at 10 times their normal proportions), your blended surface loops through itself, it is a self-intersecting surface.

I'm not sure what you mean by "sustainable" - but you should normally try to avoid that, surfaces that fold over themselves like this will not work well with some other commands later on like booleans.

It does look rather interesting though!

- Michael

>>It does look rather interesting though!

Yep, I guess it could result in interesting workflow if boolean operations worked on object itself as I mentioned once... -Petr

Hi Petr,

> Yep, I guess it could result in interesting workflow if boolean operations
> worked on object itself as I mentioned once...

One of the problems with this is that it takes quite a bit of calculations to figure out if a surface intersects itself or not.

So to allow for this would tend to cause the booleans to slow down quite a bit...

Maybe there could be some kind of a switch to turn this on so that it would be off for regular use. But it is also a bit hard to set up options like this for Booleans, Booleans don't tend to have a lot of options like for Union for instance you can just select your objects and launch Union, you never actually see any other UI for it...

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I've noticed I can duplicate edges of (poly)surface using Join command in case the edges make up a proper chain or loop. Is it a side-effect of improving offset handling an edges?

Another thing. When I work with "no unit system" option and export an objects as IGES, MoI writes "inch-flag" into IGES file - so dimensions are interpreted as inches in another applications. Did you intend it in this way?

Petr

Hi Petr,

> Is it a side-effect of improving offset handling an edges?

Not directly, just as I was testing the edge offset it happened to remind me that I should tune up join to allow edges as well.


> MoI writes "inch-flag" into IGES file

I just discussed this with the guy that makes the IGES library that I'm using, and I also looked through the IGES spec a bit.

There isn't really an offical way to mark an IGES file as having "no units". And the IGES spec says that the default value for units should be value "1" which is inches.

So that's why that happens.

A units flag of "0" is not officially listed in the spec as a valid value. I suppose it is possible that some system could interpret this to mean no units, but I think it is probably not a good idea to put something in here that is not officially supported, it is difficult to guess what might happen to other systems when reading it.

There is a flag of "3" which is some kind of custom unit support, but it is not commonly used and according to the spec it is supposed to be accompanied with a label that matches a particular IEEE unit naming convention. It is tempting to just write "None" for the label there, but it does not seem to be officially supported so it would again be producing something outside of the strict spec.

Do you have any other software that has a "no unit system" setting and also writes IGES files? If so, I would be curious what they do to handle this situation. If I knew that there was some kind of existing practice of using a flag of "0" or "3 + None" for handling this, it would make me more confident to do the same.

- Michael

For some reason or another I am no longer able to select any of the drop down boxes throughout the entire program (latest Mar-29-2007 beta) ??

Hi TaranQ - this definitely sounds odd. Do you mean drop-downs like for example the "Loft Style:" box when doing a loft?

What happens when you click on the drop-down, does the control turn highlighted (like blue)? Or just nothing happens at all?

I haven't heard of this problem before.

- Michael

Strange at office it works just fine, but at home none of the drop down boxes seem to work. I noticed when trying to set the system units, but found out none of the drop down boxes throughout the program seem to work. When I click the text in de box or the arrow to the right of the box the text get 'selected' by a dashed rectangle. But nothing else happens.... WinXP Pro btw

edit: it happens with the previous version too :( (would be nice if i could try Moi3D at home too), so I guess it's a video driver thing ?? (GeForce FX5200)

>>Not directly, just as I was testing the edge offset it happened to remind me that
>>I should tune up join to allow edges as well.

Maybe, Join could work like Rhino's _MergeEdge with edge selection. It would be useful when I want to grab a edge as a rail for sweeping... -Petr

Hi Michael,

>>There isn't really an offical way to mark an IGES file as having "no units".
>>And the IGES spec says that the default value for units should be value "1" which is inches.

If it's true, you ought to leave it in current way otherwise you could blame for making a can of worms (this is the IGES's nickname as labeled by Ashlar-Vellum :)

>>Do you have any other software that has a "no unit system" setting and also writes IGES files?

I thought MoI without unit system had written "none-flag". I checked Jan-18-2007 beta... I must say I was wrong...

Petr

ps:
Note that Rhino allows writting IGES with unit flags of "0" (none) or "3" (undefined). When I import it in CAM software (AlphaCAM) I get a warning for "0" flag (flag of "3" is OK):

*** Warning (IEVM_BAD_GLB_UNIT_FLAG) ***
The Unit flag (Index 14) in the IGES file's Global section is 0, which is outside the valid range of 1 to 11.
Action taken: The Unit Flag (Index 14) in the Global section has been changed to 1.

*** Warning (IEVM_BAD_GLB_UNIT_FLAG_MATCH) ***
In the IGES file's Global section, the Unit flag (Index 14), 1, and Unit string (Index 15), , specify conflicting units of measure.
Action taken: The Unit string (Index 15) in the IGES file's Global section has been changed to IN.

Here's a short screengrab so you can see what happens .... or better what doesn't happen ... :( concerning the drop down box problem..

Hi TaranQ - have you tried rebooting your machine since this has been happening? That might be worth a try.

One other question - do you know if your machine was updated from IE6 to IE7 recently? If you have IE7, you might try pushing the IE "Reset" button - this is mentioned on this blog page: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2006/06/12/628499.aspx - it is in IE under the Tools menu / Internet Options / Advanced Tab, then there is a Reset button at the bottom there.

> so I guess it's a video driver thing ?? (GeForce FX5200)

Actually this one is probably not due to video driver issues. MoI actually hosts a mini Internet Explorer panel to display the UI there, and something is not working right with IE on your system there. That's why an IE reset may help.

One other experiment you might try - after you click on the dropdown and get the dashed rectangle on it, try using Alt+down arrow on the keyboard and see if that opens up the dropdown or not. That is a keyboard shortcut for opening drop-downs, if that works then it narrows it down to something involving clicking rather than the drop-down itself being broken somehow...

- Michael