Hi eric,

> Just thought I would mention it again. I would sure like a self healing extrude. Like
> MoveFace in Rhino. It would save me many boolean unions.

Yup, some kind of automatic boolean included with extrusion is still on my list, like lots of stuff unfortunately...

I would like to include it with v3 but right now it's hard to know exactly when it will happen.

The past 2 months or so have been taken up pretty much entirely by researching different n-sided patch mechanisms for filling in holes with irregular boundaries.

- Michael

> >The past 2 months or so have been taken up pretty much entirely by researching different n-sided patch mechanisms for filling in holes with irregular boundaries.

I wish you all the best with what you're doing there, Michael.

I remember the thread where you went through some of the options available to you and there were good and bad bits in all the current methods, but no totally good single solution.

If you can eventually come up with something that meets your expectations, then we can be pretty sure it'll be better than almost anything else, no matter the price - it must be some undertaking!

Cheers.
Martin (2).

If it turns out to be something that you have to write yourself, as you have mentioned before, Then my vote would be that I am willing to wait for that, because it will be better than anything that you are researching currently. Like your viewport mesher, or export mesher......

If you decide that investing the years to create it is not a good ROI, then I wont hold it against you.
2 cents.

Hi Burr, well I'm hoping to avoid spending years and years on it. Hopefully I will have something not too much longer, I think it may be possible that there won't be one single mechanism that will cover every kind of situation so there might be a few different modes each of which takes a different approach and works better for some different kinds of situations.


@Martin,
> I wish you all the best with what you're doing there, Michael.

Thanks very much Martin!

So far it's been mostly reading tons of headache inducing research papers and several failed experiments. I think that I'm getting to a point where I'm seeing the kinds of things that are most problematic though, so some of my newest experiments seem to be going better.


It's difficult because trying to force the surface through the boundary areas tends to result in wiggles in other parts of the surface, forcing things through a certain shape and also having things smooth are basically sort of opposing forces.


A lot of research results use some kind of special purpose surface that is not directly compatible with a regular NURBS surface. That's for example why the ACIS one behaves so differently when they export it. I found the paper from 1994 that describes the mechanism that the analytic ACIS blend uses, and it's only well defined on the interior of the polygonal region of the boundaries, it does not behave well for points outside the boundary so it has to switch to a completely different approximate fitting mechanism when it needs to convert to a regular trimmed NURBS surface.


- Michael

"""""""So far it's been mostly reading tons of headache inducing research papers and several failed experiments.""""""""

Oh I feel you.... Maybe some 100% Kona beans would help to bring you to a sweeter place? Do you Coffee it up?

""""""""I think it may be possible that there won't be one single mechanism that will cover every kind of situation so there might be a few different modes each of which takes a different approach and works better for some different kinds of situations.""""""""""

Very cool. Cant wait to see! :o

Hi Burr,

> Oh I feel you.... Maybe some 100% Kona beans would help to bring you to a sweeter place? Do you Coffee it up?

Thanks for the offer! :) I have actually been drinking quite a bit of coffee recently but I'm probably going to try and lessen that a bit for a while. So I won't take you up on that right now anyways.

I've been really itching to share some of these test results, but I've leaned more towards keeping it quiet since I just haven't been sure that I'm going to get all the pieces together.

Oh actually I have something to share - I just remembered that I saved off a few of the more interesting magnificently failed tries, check these attached ones.

- Michael

lol.

Atually, that's beautiful man! (Frenchy all over those :)

The first one kindof sent me.................. :o

Although, now you've done it. Cat's out....

Yeah the first one is pretty cool if you just rotate around for a while after loading it, you start out on the inside of it.

The last 2 have a kind of alien wart effect.

- Michael

"""""""""""The last 2 have a kind of alien wart effect.""""""""""

Save the code project at those steps.. Later, they could be a plug-in addition!!!!!

"Alien Wart skin" maker. :o

Indeed curious! :)
biz2, biz3 ok
but on my old computer (10 years old)
here the biz1: in not a speed time of loading 70 ko = 5 minutes
the biz0: 1.5 Mega I abort after the loading not a reasonable time!

Hi Pilou, do you have a tighter than default angle set for Options > View > Meshing parameters?

The default for that value is 10 degrees, which already generates pretty dense display meshes. If you have it set to an angle less than that, it will cause really very dense display meshes to be created which will consume a lot of memory especially on chaotic surfaces like these.

Especially if you have an old computer you probably will not want to set it to less than 10 degrees.

- Michael

Yep that was that!

Now I put 50 and it's instantaneous even for the 1.5 mega file!
Cool !:) here Biz

very interesting, thanks for sharing, and not only Architects, but object designers too

Luis G.

With this code you can start a new version of Moi for Post-modernists. They'll jump all over it :)