maybe something like this :)
Draw 2 profils of waves, make an extrude along a path
Just boolean Dif with your glass

nice and tricky solution thanks!!!!
Anyways if i need non static water i think it's better for everyone to use a "fluid simulator"

Yes, Pilou's tip is good - extrude using the "Set path" is one good way to make a wave.

There are a few other methods you could use too - you could make a flat plane made up of many control points and then pull surface points up or down, see this post for an example of that method: http://moi3d.com/forum/index.php?webtag=MOI&msg=863.2

Also a one-rail sweep can do it. For example, after drawing these 2 curves:



Select one of them, then run Construct / Sweep, pick the other curve as the rail and you can construct this swept surface:



You can adjust the shape of the profile or the rail to change the shape, and you can also use more than one profile if you want to gain more fine tuned control.

Make sure you build your wave to be a little larger than your glass, then you can use Edit/Trim or a boolean to cut the wave surface by the glass to remove the outside part of the wave.

- Michael

If i take the 2 curves that I have used for the "extrude" and want make a sweep with it
that don't work in a reasonable time! In fact I don't wait more then 10 minutes so I don't know if that works or not!
Is that normal?

And a suggestion : can you add an "elapsed Timer" for a function from start of it to the finish (if exist) ?
So with it we can have an idea for the next time :)

Hi Pilou, that's not too surprising - sweep tries to move your profile shape along the other curve keeping it perpendicular as it travels along it.

Since your path curve has many very tight bends and corners in it, this will make a very complex surface as it tries to follow and refine the sweep along each one of those very tight corners.

This will mostly slow down a lot since it will start to consume really a large amount of memory and Windows will start swapping chunks of memory to disk.


re: Elapsed timer - unfortunately this is pretty difficult to do with many of the algorithms that MoI uses for calculations. Often times MoI does not know in advance how many steps something is going to take to finish, instead it often tends to be a kind of refinement process where it starts with a simple approximation to the final result, and tests to see if it is accurate enough or not. If not, then additional points are added and then then re-tested, refined again if necessary, etc...

MoI just doesn't know in advance how many refinement steps are going to be needed, it only knows the total number of steps after everything has finished.

That tends to make it difficult to have a progress meter for a many kinds of calculations.

- Michael

finally i've did it, with Micheal solution for the "wave" effect.
thanks

Not an estimation, just the time of a function when this last is successed :) (beginning to the end)

Hi Pilou, where would you expect to see a timer like that in the UI?

For simple operations a timer like that would always be saying like 1 second or something...

- Michael

It is useful when you have started a function and make another thing (another prog or when you go in another place to drink a beer)
when you come back in front your computer, the function is successful, and you know how many times that was ellapsed :)
That will be useful when you will want to make a same function in the futur!
You don't think any time to see your clock : so an internal Moi's clock begin/end function success will be a must :)
Not so difficult I presume :)

Hi Pilou,

> That will be useful when you will want to make a same function in the futur!

But only if you repeat the function with the same input curves. For example sweep generally does not take as long as with it does with your complex curves.


> You don't think any time to see you clock

But you want to see the final elapsed time somewhere, right? Where would I display it?


> Not so difficult I presume :)

Doing the timing itself is certainly very easy. The difficult part is figuring out where in the UI I could display that information back to you, without it just causing clutter for regular use.

The problem is that feature would not do any good for regular simple usage where things are only taking less than a few seconds for each operation... One thing that keeps MoI easy to use is I try to get the most use out of the UI as possible, if something is only useful in one particular special case, it makes it difficult to justify allocating a part of the UI for it.

If I add too many things to the standard UI, pretty soon it gets very cluttered, and once it gets cluttered it gets harder to use.... That would be my concern with this option.

- Michael

Maybe something like this :)
But all that is just a suggestion :)

I see - but that UI would be very specific to just the sweep command...

Would it make sense for only sweep to have this kind of time report in it and not any other functions?

- Michael

For all functions of course :)

> For all functions of course :)

The UI that you show there is only part of the Sweep options dialog - other commands don't have a "Scaling rail" button.

- Michael

< other commands don't have a "Scaling rail" button
But all functions have a dialog box where is writed "Done" or "Cancel"
so there is always somewhere a little place for input the timer for "complex functions" :)

Hi Pilou, there are some places where that won't work.

For example when the boolean commands finish, there aren't any options to adjust, so the "Done" and "Cancel" buttons are removed immediately after the boolean finishes...

- Michael

< so the "Done" and "Cancel" buttons are removed immediately after the boolean finishes...
In this case :)

Hi Pilou, at the moment there is a place there. But in version 2.0 when you are not in a command, that currently blank area will probably be filled with a panel that shows and allows you to edit the properties of the selected object.

Anything that goes in that spot needs to be of a pretty high usefulness for general operation of the program.

I'm sorry - the timer just does not seem to be useful in enough situations to place it in such a prominent place in the UI... Most of the time it would just say "2 seconds elapsed" - it would only be helpful in some very particular and somewhat unusual circumstances.

I've got to be very careful not to add a lot of UI widgets that are only useful in unusual circumstances, because that is how things get cluttered and harder to use!

But one thing I want to add at some point in the future is a mini text log output area where I can write stuff like error messages and additional information, maybe once I figure out where that will go I could add an "elapsed time" message to that output.

- Michael

No problem, it's not vital essential crucial:)