> Sorry I wanted to say "circles helpers"

I thought that was what you meant.

Do you have a situation where a "construction circle" would help out a lot more than just drawing a regular circle object?

- Michael

> For example if you draw a "Font Alphabet"

The next beta will have a new "Text" feature so you won't have to draw your alphabet by hand anymore, you'll be able to use TrueType fonts... :)

- Michael

> Typically most people are more concerned about "up, down, left, and right" instead of "x,y,z".

 

The beautiful thing about MoI is that you don't have to deal with
a lot of the annoying idiosyncratic mechanisms typical of most other 3D programs.
There are some technical things to learn and concepts to understand, but the
interface is fairly transparent in that it's not inhibiting you so much from being
involved in the creative process.

Michael, I was trying to figure out how to use construction lines to re-orient a curve, similar to
the way Rhino's "orient 2 points" works, but then I realized it would have to scale and move
at the same time. Is that something that we'll eventually be able to do in MoI? Is there a way to do it now?

Thanks,

-Jesse

> similar to the way Rhino's "orient 2 points" works, but then I realized it would
> have to scale and move at the same time.

Yeah, that actually does move + rotate + scale all combined together.


> Is that something that we'll eventually be able to do in MoI?

Yes, it will definitely be a part of the batch of orientation tools that I will work on for V2.


> Is there a way to do it now?

You can get the same thing right now by doing 3 steps of drag, and then rotate, and then scale. If you need more details, can you please post an example file of your curve and where you wish to place it?

- Michael

< The next beta will have a new "Text" feature so you won't have to draw your alphabet by hand anymore, you'll be able to use TrueType fonts... :)
Hehe
Very cool news for the Moi's users !!!
Maybe a little less for Font's creators using Moi's helpers o:)

In fact as you can reorient or rotate the clines it's like one circle's radius but not like a real complet "circle background helper" :)

> In fact as you can reorient or rotate the clines it's like one circle's
> radius but not like a real complet "circle background helper" :)

Eventually I may be able to provide some additional snaps during this cline reorient / rotation, since the construction line has 2 points the distance between them could be used as the radius of a sphere that could be intersected with other nearby objects. But I'm not going to try that one for V1.

- Michael

Seems Dürer has used massively circles helpers :)

in fact maybe "color layers background helpers" or similar will be also useful for drawing curves over a model?

Hi Michael,

>I'd be very surprised if the current system is not what artists expect - your message here is actually the very first complaint that I've heard about it!

Typically most people are more concerned about "up, down, left, and right" instead of "x,y,z".

The current system rotates objects to preserve what is considered the "up" direction.

Sorry I must be more specific here. I am talking about a 3d real time pipeline mainly. In such pipeline you export a geometry and you have to consider the complete orientation of the object not just the up direction. Look at this example, this is a car that I have done : the car is pointing in the positive Z direction and the driver is on the positive X side. So if I am using MoI to build a mesh ( the starting point ! ) I would need to transform the mesh in my "final"(-> export) software. This is a room for errors ( and this error can be difficult to see early in the process with a more "generic" type of mesh...) that won't be accepted in many companies...it may sound stupid but its true.
Most meshs from MoI won't be used for the final output but they will need to match the low polygon version(-> for backing :normal map, occlusion, ...). Another thing is the fact that MoI will be used as a starting point mainly.


>I guess I don't really understand what you would prefer instead

Actually you have 2 solutions ( not necessary for v1 ) :
* provide a more complete output.
*Allow us to build in the correct orientation right from the start-> Let me choose the "ground" plane ( and based on this choice, feature like vertical snap should follow of course ).

>yep straight snap ( vertical snap ) is what I was looking for, don't know why I have miss that..It's an old rhino feature too if I remember correctly. Tks for the info on the workflow with Clines and I can't wait for an arbitrary construction plane ( maybe in v2 )!

Hi Michael,

Thanks, yes, rotate would have to be part of the orient2points, too, I didn't think of that. ;-)
Since I would usually be using it to place cross sections along two rails, maybe I can array
a certain number of them along the rails and then rotate and scale them for now.

-Jesse

>yep straight snap ( vertical snap ) is what I was looking for, don't know why
> I have miss that..It's an old rhino feature too if I remember correctly.

Almost - the old Rhino feature was similar but slightly different, it was called "elevator mode". If you held down the control key it would lock down the x,y point on the plane and let you track vertically off of the plane, and you used a different method ("ortho", activated with shift) to do straight lines in the x and y axes, but ortho did not snap in Z.

For MoI I really wanted to get away from using all those kinds of special modifier keys like Shift and Control, etc...


> I can't wait for an arbitrary construction plane ( maybe in v2 )!

Yup, I think these will be a part of V2.


- Michael