The more I use the new functionality in 'Extrude' the more I'm discovering it's capabilities, it's almost there as a direct editing tool.
I'm just wondering if a few more tweaks can be made in surface merging, for example, the video shows a situation where I want to extend a wall of the model with radii, it works okay the model is still a solid and still usable however if that front surface and the smaller surfaces produced by the Extrude were to merge to one surface again it would be a cleaner model and awesome :)
Hi Danny, right now the surface combining only happens for a basic plane which you'll get from an extruded line. Even though the arc shape makes a planar surface when it is extruded since it does not have just the simple 4 corner point type of surface structure it does not get converted into a plane primitive and that's the ones that get combined currently.
I'd like to do some tune ups in the future to make surface combining happen for more cases but the particular case you have there might be somewhat difficult because the surfaces you want to merge there don't share the same UV layouts. So it means the simplified combined plane has a different UV parameter space layout in that area after it's combined, I don't remember if the combining mechanism is going to handle that type of thing or if it expects the combined surface to be more compatible in UV structure to the uncombined versions.
> How about automatically replacing the surface if planar?
That could be possible but it has some side effects like for example right now if you extrude a curve such that it generates the type of vertical surface you have there, if you want to edit the control points of it, it might be weird if you got a larger 4 point plane as the surface to edit rather than one with the control points of your original curve.
One of the ways that Extrude works currently is that the surface you get inherits the same control point structure as your generating curve, if these kinds of surfaces were replaced by 4 corner point planes that would not be the case anymore...
I see. You're thinking for all scenarios where someone might want to edit the control points, I understand, I'm looking at it as in the Engineering point of view where control points in a model are never moved.
Thanks anyway, I can always go the extra step and delete those surfaces and use Construct > Planar to make nice single surfaces.
Hi Danny, well in addition to moving control points there are some functions like Flow where the particular control point structure of the surface has an impact... So replacing surfaces in extrude could then have a side effect of some unwanted changes in behavior when then using flow on that surface afterwards.
I actually do have a similar type of surface replacement mechanism in Revolve currently, where if you have a line perpendicular to the revolve axis it gets replaced by a trimmed plane just like that, and it has indeed gotten a couple of people confused when using Flow with those particular surfaces...
On the plus side a simple plane surface does tend to work better for intersections calculations.
