The Extrude auto booleans looks so sweet, thanks for the new beta !

Just wondering, can't this push/pull be the normal behavior when you sub-select and drag a face ? so you don't actually need to use the extrude command ?

I'm asking that because I have half read the beta log. I just lauch MoI, create a cube, and my first thought was that I could just select and drag a face. Seems very natural too me, I had to come back on the forum to undrestand I have to use the extrude command.

Also Michael, it will be great to not only extrude but also shell, for examaple to change size of holes, or increa/decreas chamfer.
Also it will be great to move holes.

Push-pull extrude boolean is a great addition. Nice way to stay in the creative zone rather than dealing with the mechanics of boolean operations.

Ed

@ PaQ,

> Just wondering, can't this push/pull be the normal behavior when you sub-select and drag a face ?
> so you don't actually need to use the extrude command ?

I do want to do face dragging in the future but I'm waiting until I have a "move face" mechanism. Dragging is meant to be a quick way to do a Transform > Move, and moving a face is a somewhat different operation than extruding it, except for the special cases where the surrounding pieces are all at 90 degrees to each other.

In a CAD program usually to move a face means to extend the surrounding surfaces until they reintersect the newly positioned face, for example:




Extrude gives a much different kind of result, like this:




They're different operations but they happen to give the same results for certain kinds of objects like boxes.

- Michael

Hi Andrei,

> Also Michael, it will be great to not only extrude but also shell,

That is something I'd like to explore in the future. But it may be difficult to put in shell because shell already does something else when given a face sub-object selection, it uses those selected face as the openings for the shelled result.

It might fit in to offset maybe something like a "build side walls" option for when offsetting a face, that would be for doing pockets or protrusions using an offset type construction rather than an extrusion type.


> for examaple to change size of holes, or increa/decreas chamfer.
> Also it will be great to move holes.

These kinds of things will probably work better with "face transforms", similar to what I described above in the reply to PaQ, that's where after doing some edit on a particular face like moving, rotating, or scaling it, the surrounding faces are extended and reintersected with the updated face. It's something that I want to work on in the future.

- Michael

Thank you Michael for your incredible work, this new beta is a huge release!

I'm really thankful of this whole community and software, MoI is becoming my main tool and it feels so good to use.

I'm quitting my day work to work as a freelancer from 1st september and I can't wait to show you guys some of my latest stuff :)


Cheers

Michael,

great work! Just a question, how it works Nsided? I haven't understand it... Thanks. Davide

Hi Davide,

There's some discussion on Nsided here http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=5721.2

-

Thanks Danny!

Hi Michael,

It makea sense of course, thanks for your time !

Thank you Michael!!!

One word: Wow!

Thanks Michael, this is a fabulous new pack of features!

Great work Michael!!!!! :-)

The "push-pull" feature feels intuitive like the one in SketchUp, except that MoI's can push walls past all kind of weird nooks and crannys that stop SU's.
WOWWWW!!!!
Should be extremely useful.

Please consider being able to push/pull curved surfaces via their normal... or a tie-in with shell, being able to do so on adjoined selected surface. (much later - for the V4 wish list)

Also... not to sure what to make of the "planar sections" in Blend. I get some crazy results. I suppose I'll wait to see your tutorial.


So I'll make sure I get my upgrade moo-la saved... :-)
In comparison to V2, V3 is certainly even more so a powerhouse!

@Mike K4ICY

> Please consider being able to push/pull curved surfaces via their normal... or a tie-in with shell,
> being able to do so on adjoined selected surface. (much later - for the V4 wish list)

It may be difficult to put it into Shell, because Shell already uses face selections to do something different, for determining where the openings will be in the shelled result.

But maybe it could fit ok as an option inside of Offset, I'd like to explore that in V4 at some point.


> Also... not to sure what to make of the "planar sections" in Blend. I get some crazy results.
> I suppose I'll wait to see your tutorial.

It should help in situations where you've got some tight bends in a closed shape. I'll post some info on it later today.

- Michael

Just discovered the beta news, and installed it right away. The auto-Boolean is fabulous, thanks a lot Michael! MoI is getting pleasantly closer to the benefits of poly modeling.

Shifting the faces even works on a solid created by extruding a polyline curve.

One minor remark: if you use extrude on the cap of a cylinder solid, it leaves an edge loop when extruding outward. Is there a reason for that?

Thanks again,

Metin

Hi Metin, glad you're enjoying the new beta!

> One minor remark: if you use extrude on the cap of a cylinder solid, it leaves
> an edge loop when extruding outward. Is there a reason for that?

It's because currently the geometry library only knows how to merge faces together during booleans when the 2 adjacent faces are planar surfaces that are coplanar, or also when the 2 surfaces were trimmed and share the same original underlying surface. 2 cylinder pieces that are adjacent to one another do not fall into either of those categories and so do not currently get merged. But in the future I do want to try and update the face merging process to work in that case.

- Michael

Thanks for the explanation, Michael. No problem, I was just curious about this.

Just to add one from "smooth side" of the new beta. It's a new 'planar sections' blend option. On top is g2 blend without planar sections option, bottom is 'planar sections' in action, using the selected line as direction. Wow what I can do for now.....

>Just to add one from "smooth side" of the new beta. It's a new 'planar sections' blend option.
>On top is g2 blend without planar sections option, bottom is 'planar sections' in action, using the selected line as direction.

Thanks for the post I never picked up on this option in the release notes, I'll have to try that out. Looks like it solves a long running problem I've had trying to model fillets on aircraft.

Hi anto, yeah that's a good example of where "Planar sections" can help!

By default Blend makes each side of the blend come off perpendicular from the edge curve. But around bends that can then cause bunching like this:




When using the new "Planar sections" option, it uses a different method, the cross section for each blend goes on a plane. First it makes a line connecting the two opposite sides of the blend, like this:


Then it selects a plane that passes through that line. The plane is selected by using the "up direction" that you pick when you trigger the planar sections option. When you draw the "up direction", it basically specifies a family of planes that can pivot around that direction sort of like this (also called a "pencil of planes") :




The way that helps is that with each cross section completely on one of those planes it can help avoid them crossing over into each other which is what makes that kind of awkward bunching effect.

When you turn on surface control points in both of those cases you'll see the difference, with "Planar sections" each row of control points in the blend direction will be all on one plane.

Another example - without planar sections with the blend coming off perpendicular to each edge:


With planar sections - direction picked upwards along z axis:




One row of control points in the blend, note how they are all along one line when viewed from the top:





- Michael