Hi CLEENRMN,


I know that Tutorial, thanks.

heres a pic of mine

http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=510.2 i found it

Wow greatly model !!!

Hi Robert, there are a few tutorials linked under the page Mike gave above, you'll definitely want to look through those to get some more background.

I'm expecting to be working on some more tutorial and documentation information pretty soon, once the software is completely finished for V1, it won't be much longer.

One general tip - you don't normally create a complex shape all just in one single command, you normally build it up in pieces using a few different steps.

So the first step for your train could be to punch out your outline to give it some depth, kind of like a cookie-cutter type method. You can do that using the "Extrude" tool - find it under Construct / Extrude.

Since your shape is on the centerline of what you want, you'll probably want to check the "Both sides" option. Options for a command appear in the upper-right area of the MoI window. When "Both sides" is enabled, the extrusion uses your curve as a center line and the shape comes out from either side of it.

You were asking about Loft - in MoI the term Loft means to create a surface through several cross-sections. If you look at the icon for Construct / Loft, you can see 3 hoops and then the resulting lofted surface through those 3 hoops. So that isn't quite what you want for your case because you don't have multiple sections in this case.

After you have extruded your shape you will have the basic start of your train body. But it will look like a flat block. The next step that you can do is what Pilou was showing above - draw another curve tracing from the front view, and then you can use a boolean intersection to carve away portions of your initial block to refine it a little bit. You can then try to use fillets to round off some of the sharp edges.

If you want to get more control over making a smoother shape, you will probably need a different approach where you build sort of smaller sections of the train using surfacing commands, such as loft or sweeps. That will give you a lot more control over creating more free-form and less blocky surfaces, but it is a more difficult route as well. I'd recommend sticking with extrusions, booleans, and fillets for a while and experiment to see what types of shapes you can do with those.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

I m already thereby to download the tutorials.


Thanks for your Tips !!!


Robert

Need again a small tip.

Thanks in advance.


Robert

Hi Robert, your problem is that there is a small gap in your intersecting curve:



For it to work in the way you are expecting, that curve needs to be a fully closed loop.

You can fix it by selecting the curve, then go to Edit/Show pts. To seal it up, zoom in until you can see the gap and then select one point, run Transform / Move, pick the selected point as the base point for the move, and then pick the other point as the target point. That will move the points together to seal up the hole, after that you can use boolean intersection to get a better result.

For this case you have to use Transform/Move to move the points together. Just dragging them won't snap there, because when you drag a point of a curve it does not automatically snap to other points of the same curve since that would sometimes cause nearby points to bunch together. Someday I should be able to fix it up for this type of situation though.

- Michael

Hi Michael,

thank you for your assistance.

It functions.


Robert

Michael, is there a way you can add a function to >highlight open curves< like this?

This appears to be a common problem everyone experiences every now and then. If there was a tool that you could run that would say turn on the points at the open ends of your curves, it would give you a heads up before you attempt to create your surfaces. If you see 2 points on a curve that you feel should be closed then you immediately know something is not correct.

You could then easily press ESC to remove the points after fixing any curves that should have been closed.

Just a thought on how to eliminate this common user error...

-Will

The problem of "closed curves" result of the fact that Buttons "snap" Grid, Straight, Object are enable or not :)
Many time you believe to close on a point but you snap the grid ! :)

True, but just like with some poly apps you can have them highlight open edges or polygons with a specified number of points, if there was some kind of flag or perhaps a different color for open curves vs closed curves, you could tell visually when the curves you assume to be closed are actually open...

-Will

Hi Will,

> Michael, is there a way you can add a function to >highlight open curves< like this?

Here is one way - you can add a script macro that is launched by a keyboard shortcut to select all open curves. That will effectively highlight the open curves in yellow.

To do this, make sure MoI is closed, and then open up the moi.ini file using notepad. You can find moi.ini under C:\Documents and Settings\<your login name>\Application Data\Moi\moi.ini

Under the [Shortcut Keys] section, add this line (put everything for the O= on just one single long line):

[Shortcut Keys]
O=script:var curves = moi.geometryDatabase.getObjects().getCurves(); for ( var i = 0; i < curves.length; ++i ) if ( !curves.item(i).isClosed ) curves.item(i).selected = true;

With that in place, you can then push the O key on the keyboard to select all open curves.


It's a bit difficult to think of a way to automatically highlight open curves, because there are many situations where open curves are not an error.. Like for instance in the steps I recently showed here: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=606.4, there are several open curves which are fine being open.

I guess it would be good to warn not just for any open curve, but for ones that seemed like they were almost closed but not quite.

One thing that would be nice if I had a kind of "feedback" or "error" area where I could put a few lines of informative messages about warnings and other such things after a command had finished. But I haven't really figured out a good place in the UI to put stuff like that yet.

- Michael

Seems work fine !

Thanks Michael for the script! I'll definitely add it to the INI file asap!

Yes, I realize that some open curves are not errors, actually I felt my idea of displaying open curves in one color and and closed ones in another was a perfect solution to this; immediate feedback as to the type of curve you're working with.

-Will

Hi Will,

> actually I felt my idea of displaying open curves in one color and
> closed ones in another was a perfect solution to this; immediate feedback
> as to the type of curve you're working with.

There's no doubt that it would immediately visually distinguish those types of curves. But I guess that my concern would be that someone would see that curves were being differentiated somehow but not really understand immediately what was the basis for the differences. That can kind of lead to a sort of "huh?" type feeling...

I've been pretty conservative with trying not to use too many different colors for different things because for version 2.0 I want to enable you to assign your own colors to different curves to help in visually grouping them by your own schemes.

- Michael