Hi Pilou,

> Of course but it's for direct schema documentation!
> I have use it for very the good value of the arrow! ;)

Yes, but for technical drawings there are conventions used to try and avoid misunderstandings and ambiguous situations. One of the rules is that a perspective view with a dimension line like you show there is not allowed.

I guess it kind of comes down to some of the fundamental differences between a "CAD" program that has a big focus on accuracy versus a "graphic design" program that is just focused on making images.

I like to incorporate elements from both of these worlds but sometimes they are in conflict with each other.

- Michael

Hi Pilou,

re:
> We can't "Separate" a linear Dim ? (in its different elements: lines, text, heads arrows...) for Flow it for example...

Sorry, no not currently. The main focus of these tools is on doing technical drawings.

- Michael

<no not currently
So for this we can use the Max one! ;)

Hi OSTexo,

re:
> You got it, "lazy" is the right word for that Align with Dimension behavior.

There seems to be maybe a couple different bugs in linear dimension transformations, I'm investigating it.


> In that case I'd think manual flip/toggle makes sense so as not to add complexity.

I'll give this a try. I also do intend to enable turning on edit points for a dimension and moving the text position wherever you want.


> Could the existing Align tool be extended to not only effect position but also distribution?
> For example, select multiple horizontal dimensions, Align > Distribute would provide for
> spacing between dimension lines in the selected group.

The part that's difficult about this is that would have Align > Distribute processing just the dimension line and not the entire object. I guess that could be possible but it wouldn't be consistent with how Align works currently which is that it works on the bounding box around the entire object.

It seems like it might be good to instead have a "Stacked" option in the dimension command that would handle making those.


> On another dimension note do you see any potential risk for confusion by
> allowing the user to fix scale options in two places?

Do you mean for the display precision like number of decimal points to display? The setting for that in Options > General > "Decimal display" controls the appearance of the UI environment like how numbers in an edit field are displayed. It would be problematic to try and re-use that for the dimension display as well because that would mean that the dimensions in a given file would be formatted differently on what a user had set for their UI preferences.

Thanks,
- Michael

Great work Michael.

Maybe I lost some details, but how I can copy from details , area or volume results to leader or text dims?

(Right click not working for me)

Thanks,

George

Hi George, if you click on the number for Length, Area, or Volume number it will get copied to the clipboard. Either left click or right click should do the same thing. It does not pop up a menu though since other things that would be on the menu like "Select All" or "Delete" don't really make sense there. It just gets copied with the click itself.

- Michael

There is no Calcul Mass * Volume ?

Hi Pilou,

re:
> There is no Calcul Mass * Volume ?

Not currently but that's something that I would like to add in the future when I have a chance to design the UI for it. But if there are quite a lot of things to consider for it like should there be a list of materials that you pick from, do you need to enter in your own material types, is it necessary to have different densities assigned to different objects and have the mass of all of them computed together?

If all you need is a simple Mass = Density * volume calculation that is something done very easily with a calculator once you have the volume.

- Michael

Maybe you can just put a link to it! ;)

Like this shortcut directly inside Moi second column ;)

moi.filesystem.shellExecute( 'http://www.calculatoredge.com/matweight/material%20wt.htm' );

Hi Pilou,

> Maybe you can just put a link to it! ;)
>
> Like this shortcut directly inside Moi second column ;)
>
> moi.filesystem.shellExecute( 'http://www.calculatoredge.com/matweight/material%20wt.htm' );

Sorry, no it's not a good idea to have a link to a third party website like that embedded directly inside MoI. There are too many factors out of my control that can break it, like they change their domain name or even just reorganize their site so the address is a little different.

I'd recommend just keeping the link in your web browser's bookmarks.

- Michael

Sure...was just a suggestion :)

Thank you,

Worked as described above.

No problem George - I think I'll add in a little message there like "Copied to clipboard" when you click on that so that you can tell that it did something.

- Michael

hi

GREAT JOB Michael

Can you add something like the next GIF for small dimensions ?

Chri

It seems to me the fbx export is broken. The files aren't readable by our 3D software afterwards. No matter what fbx version I choose for the export.

Currently I need t o change the date to run the previous version of MoI to be able to export to fbx. Would be awesome if you could take a look at it.

Hi Chri,

> Can you add something like the next GIF for small dimensions ?

Yup, probably at first it will be a manual toggle instead of an auto switching thing.

- Michael

Hi sconstable,

re:
> It seems to me the fbx export is broken. The files aren't readable by our 3D software
> afterwards. No matter what fbx version I choose for the export.

There are some other changes for FBX format, it now supports writing object names and materials to the FBX file.

What is the other software that can't import them now?

You can disable the materials export by a setting in moi.ini :

[FBX Export]
WriteMaterials=n

Does that make any difference with that set?

Can you please post an example .fbx file that isn't read by your other software?

Thanks,
- Michael

As I am becoming more familiar with how these dimensions work I am also realizing what a clever and potentially powerful implementation it is. And it's actually not that difficult to add dimensions to a 3D model should you choose to do what's not allowed ;)

And with the Cplane you can dimension any 3D thing not orthodox mechanical drawing! ;)

Hi Terry, that sure is looking nice! Now if you can make a PDF that looks like that too that's going to be pretty convenient.

So maybe the key to making the "forbidden style" easier is to have some more options for setting the construction plane. Maybe something like a "quick cplane" that will set it to a select face just for the duration of one command and then automatically restore it. Something to experiment with after v4 is wrapped up.

One of the problems with not projecting them is that it's pretty unexpected I think to place dimensions in an ortho view say like this:



And then to get this type of result:



When I saw that happening it was kind of "uh-oh that's probably not so good".

But if you really want to give non-projected a try it's actually possible to do that. Edit the text file DimLinear.js inside the install commands folder, and on line 7 change this:

    pointpicker.projectToCPlane = true;

to this:

    //pointpicker.projectToCPlane = true;

- Michael