Hi all

I'm just in the process of going through the tutorial for building the speaker by Magic" Mike and have got to the part where I need to join the bottom circular edges with the outer frame. When I try and do this the bottom edge is a edge selection but the loft edge is a closed curve. If I delete this curve (which is one unit, how I like it) it leaves me with loads of parts to the bottom of the lofted outer part which is harder to select. Is there a way of getting my joined curve to work so I can blend the two edges together like in the tut? I sure its basic but I am still a beginner ;-)

Thanks guys and see attached.

Ok Michael is on the subject :)

Hi Lang - it looks like your upper piece is made up of many different faces (and therefore many different edges instead of just one edge) because the curves you used to construct the upper piece were made up of many different sub segments. You can see the different segments by selecting them and using Edit > Separate.

When you construct a surface from a segmented curve, it will generate a bunch of different faces, with one face for each sub segment. In order to avoid that you need to remove the segmentation from your curves and make the curve to be just one single segment instead of many. The easiest way to do that is to run the Rebuild command on it:
http://moi3d.com/2.0/docs/moi_command_reference10.htm#rebuild

Also see this previous thread going over a similar thing with the same tutorial:
http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5001.1

- Michael

Thanks Michael.

So if I was to run the rebuild command now would that sort out this issue? Or would I have to go back and rebuild the curves first then run the rebuild command?

When I built the curves they were built from straight forward curves as the tut suggests and then joining and so on. How often is best to keep running the rebuild command whilst building this sort of stuff to avoid these problems?

Thanks again Michael for you help here.

Lang

Hi Lang,

> So if I was to run the rebuild command now would that sort out this issue? Or would I have to go back
> and rebuild the curves first then run the rebuild command?

You would need to delete the surface you've currently got, then run Rebuild on the curves that you're using, and then build the surface again.


> When I built the curves they were built from straight forward curves as the tut suggests and then
> joining and so on. How often is best to keep running the rebuild command whilst building this sort
> of stuff to avoid these problems?

For most cases it's not really an issue having things broken apart into different faces, and in some cases it's actually better since you can separate things for some localized work.

But Blend is an exception - for the particular case that you plan to use Blend later on then you would want to run Rebuild before constructing the objects you want to blend between.

In the future I'm going to be overhauling Blend so that it will be able to work on a longer chain of connected edges rather than just between 2 at a time, and at that point it will be much less of an issue.

- Michael

Hi Lang and Michael!

Lang, yes, that's right. Blend currently works by joining a tangent surface between two single curved edges, whether the edge curves be a closed course or as a piece.

I use Rebuild religiously now! I tends to make things easier down the road with only one edge to worry about.

There are two other things to consider as well:

1) Sometimes you might have a clean and solid surface face but the edge curve seems to be made of more than one segment.
You may also notice that these segments have no intersecting seam that separates two surfaces.
If this is the case, you can select them provided they are all touching and run the Merge command. Then you should have a solid curve for the edge of that single face.

2) Some times unavoidably, you have a nice single curved edge on a surface that you wish to blend to something else that just so happens to have many broken individual segments with their own faces. Kinda like you have now.
Did you know you could break a single edge curve up into smaller segments so that maybe you could make a Blend for each section that corresponds to each surface edge.
If you grab the larger solid edge curve and run Trim, then you can push the Add Points button and add some points to that curve.
Then when you hit done, you will still have a solid surface face, but you should have broken segments now. You could thus use those to Blend to other things.

To see a little on that check this out: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=4607.5


But yes, a wise man named Michael encouraged me to think "Whole-istically", and I now try for larger, more whole surfaces with the help of Rebuild and Network.

Thanks guys your both stars.

I tried that method of deleting the current faces so I got back to just the curves and did exactly what you said of running the rebuild command after and whey hey it worked. I guess it all about being quite methodical about how your building and using the rebuild.

Michael, do you plan to add the rebuild to UI eventually?

Lang

Hi Lang,

> Michael, do you plan to add the rebuild to UI eventually?

Yup, I just haven't figured out a good place to put it yet.

- Michael

> Yup, I just haven't figured out a good place to put it yet.

Michael, there's a blank spot open in the "Edit" pane. ;-)

If you make an icon group for "Tools" or "More", you could put sub-icons for Rebuild, Merge, ShrinkTrimmedSrf, and Flip.

And because it would be at the bottom right, you could have two rows at eight total features.

- yet, you would still not really notice it cluttering up the UI, because it's all hidden in a group.

Hi Mike, I'm not quite sure yet whether to do something like that or whether to put a bunch of tools on to an "extended properties" dialog which will probably hold a lot of other things as well.

It seems like some lesser used and specialty tools should probably just be on some kind of text menu or text buttons rather than needing an actual regular big icon button.

I'm pretty sure that there needs to be a properties dialog with a lot of other information and controls present on it already so that might be a good location for these things as well.

- Michael

That'll work.

And maybe some extended list like that would scan the Commands or Scripts folders for anything third-party, so to speak.

Hi Mike,

> And maybe some extended list like that would scan the Commands or Scripts
> folders for anything third-party, so to speak.

I think that will go on some kind of Plug-ins button on the bottom toolbar that will pop up a big menu of installed plug-ins.

But I also want to overhaul the plug-in installation system so that they're stored in some central location like where moi.ini is instead of needing to be copied into the commands folder.

- Michael

>But I also want to overhaul the plug-in installation system so that they're stored in some central location like where moi.ini is instead of needing to be copied into the >commands folder.


This would be good idea. would make it a bit easier to re-install MoI (I blew away a MoI install then realized I had forgotten to make a backup of all the extra scripts i had installed :) )