Hi Martin, there's a pretty good mixture of both kinds of tools in MoI, meaning both ones that try to finish when they have everything they need as well as some that are more "review and tweak" oriented.

Almost all the drawing tools are the "quick acting" kind that do not have an extra review step, for example when you draw a line it finishes when you place the 2nd point, you don't review the finished line and then accept it, and when drawing a circle once you click a point for the radius the circle command finishes and doesn't sit around waiting for you to review what the radius was in an additional stage. That kind of behavior kind of helps these commands flow along a bit quicker, because a review step would require an additional click.

But then other commands may have additional options that can be adjusted on a kind of final "options" stage.

Sometimes it's been a judgement call where if I suspect that the result may be hard to visualize and that there may be a lot of undo/relaunching involved then I may go ahead and add in an extra review and adjust stage.

But since adding in new stages adds more steps to finish the command, it's basically the default strategy to not do it - I mean imagine if every time you drew a line you had to do 3 things to finish the line instead of only 2 things, that would get to be annoying pretty quick.


Which part do you find yourself needing to change often while doing the grid array, is it the number of copies you're making, or just the spacing, or both ?

If it's the spacing some kind of dynamic preview while drawing the spacing rectangle might help to solve that, one reason though that I did not try that initially is that you can often be making a pretty large amount of copies using array grid and that's somewhat difficult to deal with dynamically because of the performance hit. In the time since array grid was originally designed I do now have a mechanism in place to make a lighter weight preview of copied geometry so it could be more feasible to do it now.


- Michael

Hi Michael,

I like how the "Array in a straight line" tool not only shows you an active preview, but gives you snazzy options for how to dictate the spacing.

Any way it could be possible for Array Grid to have some of that functionality. I do understand, that by the rule of multiplicity, a grid or cube of objects being reproduced would yied in a higher order than just the linear option, so I could just image smoke pouring out of my vid card.

I have to do quite a bit of guess work with Array Grid as opposed to Array in line.

Hi Mike, yeah the problem with ArrayGrid is the possibility to create some truly huge number of copies too easily.

Also part of the simplicity of the ArrayDir comes from it only needing to control things in one direction - you seem to be talking about a full 3D cube array and not just a 2D grid? That's 3 directions and not just one direction like ArrayDir has and so of course it's difficult to make something as simple as the one directional thing.

But it is possible to just use ArrayDir 3 times in sequence, doesn't that do what you're asking about actually? I mean how would an "array grid with array dir mechanics" be any different from just doing array dir 3 times in a row?

- Michael

Hi Michael.

I think I was expecting it to be a bit like, say the Fillet tool, where you can see what you'll get before commiting.

Things feels a little different, because as soon as the numbers have been entered and you've clicked OK in the calculator pop-up, it moves straight to the next stage.

In effect, if you have used MoI's pop-up calculator or pressed Enter to have a value accepted, you don't seem to get the chance to verify the number values at the X Y, or Z Spacing stage of the array, before proceeding by pressing Done or right-clicking, and I sense this as different behaviour when compared to the initial 'Choose number of copies' stage.

My feelings are similar to Mike's and I wonder if some kind of simplified preview of the arrayed items (bounding box?) might be useful and give enough feedback for the user to judge if the numbers he's entering are giving the kind of result he's looking for. Maybe the 'Calculating...' text could be displayed in complicated situations?

I'd find a Preview option check box acceptable within the dialogues, but whether that's a practical option for you and others I don't know.

 

Thanks.
Martin (2).

Hi Martin, usually I try to avoid having a "Preview" type button and instead just do the preview.

> I think I was expecting it to be a bit like, say the Fillet tool, where you
> can see what you'll get before commiting.
>
> Things feels a little different, because as soon as the numbers have been entered
> and you've clicked OK in the calculator pop-up, it moves straight to the next stage.

Yeah well it is definitely different from Fillet because Fillet only has parameters to adjust in the final stage, while Array grid is broken up into 2 different stages with each stage having some parameters.

But I don't know how I could show a preview for things only while in the "number of copies" stage, because there is not enough information gathered up at that time to actually generate a result, in order to make the array I need to know the number of copies as well as the spacing to be used, and the spacing gets defined in the second stage...

So it could be possible for me to show a preview for when you're drawing the spacing rectangle, but I don't see how I could show it on the "setting number of copies" stage, with how the command is currently structured.

I guess you might be asking about combining all those options together into all one single stage instead of having multiple stages. But trying to break things down into some separate steps is one of the ways that helps to keep things more simplified and easier to use in general because it keeps each individual task somewhat more focused, so that's another thing that I try to do in general to make things easier to use.

What is the situation where you are making an array and you don't know how many copies you need to generate, are you trying to do something like fill a particular region with a pattern? Maybe if I knew more about the situation that you're having difficulty with I could try to make some other alternate tool or some other mode for the array that would work better for that kind of use case.

- Michael

> But it is possible to just use ArrayDir 3 times in sequence, doesn't that do what you're asking about actually? I mean how would an "array grid with array dir mechanics" be any different from just doing array dir 3 times in a row?

Thanks Michael.

I believe I already intuitively follow that method on occasion... The work flow is often so intuitive that it's easy not to think too much about what does what.

It's like when I wonder if it would be possible to tell Array Circular a 2-point 3D axis rather than be stuck with it's C-Plane axis.
I'm used to automatically finding myself Re-Orienting the C-Plane and performing the circular Array without much thought in the process.

Hi Michael.

In essence, all I'm querying is why the second and third (X,Y and Z spacing stages) 'move on' without a right-click or by pressing the Done button. Please look at my video to see what I mean.

http://screencast.com/t/QYy15lOuZIc

A preview feature would be very nice to have for those occasions where an array is called for in perhaps a decorative way, where spacing and number are decided by eye rather than by a specific number and measurement. However, that isn't what I'm asking for at this time - I'm just thinking about the thing in my first paragraph.

The last part of my screencast shows a 2D array system that's part of one of my CAM programs and it works pretty well for me - again, I'm not asking you to build it into MoI or anything, it's just there for interest's sake.


Cheers.
Martin (2).

Hi Martin,

> In essence, all I'm querying is why the second and third (X,Y and Z spacing stages) 'move on'
> without a right-click or by pressing the Done button. Please look at my video to
> see what I mean.

It's because those steps are following the same workflow as the Rectangle drawing command.

If you go to Draw curve > Rectangle > Corner, then place the corner point you'll see the same kind of prompt for entering in both a width and height and once you have filled in both of those that's enough information to finish the rectangle and the rectangle command ends. This eliminates an extra step that would otherwise be needed - with the current workflow for rectangle drawing if you want to create a rectangle of width 10 and height 20 you type in 10, then push tab then type 20 and push enter and it's done, you don't need another additional step for pressing "Done" on top of that.

Since the ArrayGrid is basically drawing a rectangle there, it is set up to try and maintain the same behavior as the regular rectangle drawing command.

It's possible to modify the array behavior by editing the ArrayGrid command script file to make it behave like you want though - in a text editor like Notepad, go to the \commands sub-folder inside of MoI's main installation folder (you will need to right-click on Notepad and use "Run as administrator" if you're using a recent version of Windows since Windows now prevents modification to stuff in \Program Files by default) and open up the ArrayGrid.js file. Go to line number 158 which has this:

			if ( HaveWidth && HaveHeight )
				break;

and either delete those lines or "comment them out" by putting 2 backslashes in front of both lines like this:

			//if ( HaveWidth && HaveHeight )
			//	break;

Once you have done that then I think you should get the behavior that you're asking about where it won't proceed automatically once both width and height have been entered numerically (as opposed to entered by clicking points with the mouse for a spacing rectangle). But you will now have an inconsistent behavior between the regular rectangle drawing command and this area.

- Michael

Thanks for that, Michael.

It's just what I wanted, I've now got the option to check and edit the numbers before finalising the array - the extra mouse click isn't an inconvenience for me.

A preview feature would be nice at some time in the future, provided you could find a good way to implement it and your workload eases a little.


Much appreciated.
Martin (2).