*insert obligatory apology for being a n00b*

Recently I've been building a cat. The problem I've been having has to do with how lofting is performed. I currently have several cross sections that I loft but due to their differing shapes the positions of the control points are drastically different, so much so that it results in lateral torquing of the lofted surface (areas of the surface appear pulled in).

I propose an interface to modify the spacing on the guide curves to adjust the torque. It would show a number of points (user configurable) that could be dragged along the curve that would only effect lofting/networking and not deform the curve. Maybe to keep these points separate from normal points make them a different shape or color them differently.

I would love to hear suggestions with how I can get out of this mess without a huge amount of work.

Hi BW, can you please post a .3dm file of your curves? That will help me figure out what I can do to fix this up.

There is actually a tune-up coming to Loft (and sweep) for the next beta that should provide a better method for aligning shapes like this.

One way in the current beta that should work is to use Network surface instead, and put in some lines for the spots that you want connected. That should pretty much behave like the spacing modifying UI like you were describing.

But if you post your curves it would help me figure it out.

- Michael

Sure no problem.

Here are the ribs used in the above screen shot but mirrored joined.

Oh and I really like MOI's interface, other modeling software drives me insane (I will spare you from my rant on the topic).

Hi BW - thanks for posting those.

As you can kind of tell, what's happening there is different point spacing between those curves kind of makes a mis-match between them when they are combined.

Part of lofting or sweeping involves combining the structures of different profiles together into a single structure for the surface.

The next beta has some new options to control some different ways for how this combination takes place. In this case the default will still generate your twisted result, but there is a new "refit" option that you can turn on which will reconstruct the curves and match them based purely on equivalent distances traveled (instead of equivalent "parameters" which is affected by point spacing).

Occasionally the new refit procedure may generate some very slight ripples in the resulting surface, that's why I haven't always turned it on for everything by default, right now it only turns it on by default if it sees that the other result will generate too complex of a surface, it doesn't know to automatically analyze for too much twist yet, maybe I will be able to do that in a future version but that is somewhat difficult.

But anyway it shouldn't be too much longer before I put out the next beta and with one option switch you will get the attached result instead.

For the moment, I think that adding in about 3 lines and doing Network will probably do the job currently.


I'm glad that you are enjoying MoI's interface!

Thanks,

- Michael