Hello,

I have attached an example of what I am speaking about with loft. I would like the points to line up with the "X" on the circle, but cannot seem to make that happen. Refit gets closest. Thanks.

ostexo

If you split your circle using the cross lines and separate the lines of the other profile you can then make 4 seperate lofts (or mirror the lofts). Picture shows the 2 lines to loft between. then the same process for the other sides.

Also i use spaceclaim. Im not sure what you want to use it for? but it works well with rhino and can you can cut paste from MoI. it needs a bit of getting used to as its quite a different way of working. have you got a trial? my biggest tip would be if the part is symmetric cut half away and you can more easily adapt it then mirror it back after the changes? If you can keep splitting the part into simpler pieces it will work very well.

Jamie

Hello Jamie,

Thanks for the tip, the procedure worked well. I would be using SCE to clean up and simplify some models as well as work on some conceptual enclosures for some equipment. I'm by no means an engineer, but will have those who know what they are doing make sure the parts can be built. I like the idea of how you can build out geometry the way they demonstrate. I fell through the cracks after requesting a demo a few months ago, SC just got back to me now... I'm not sure if that is a good thing or how they are doing in general. I did a demo on Rhino and found it to be too much / cluttered for my taste, maybe that is why I like MoI. Do you use Style or Engineer?

Hi

Glad it worked. Im using spaceclaim style with Rhino. The only thing that I miss is the healing functions from the engineer version. Mostly I use it for the solid modeling that is weaker in rhino (ie shelling) also for simplifying and adapting geometry. also good for very quickly sketching things out in 3d. I also use MoI whenever I can instead of rhino and paste into rhino for some tools MoI doesnt have.

The next release of spaceclaim should be end of this month. I would go ahead with the demo and see if it suits you. There are a lot of tutorial videos on the spaceclaim site which are really helpful. do you have an example picture of the type of housing you would be looking to create?

Jamie

Hi OSTexo,

> I have attached an example of what I am speaking about
> with loft. I would like the points to line up with the "X" on
> the circle, but cannot seem to make that happen. Refit gets
> closest. Thanks.

I see - but that is actually not a bug, it's more of a lack of "artifical intelligence" in MoI.

When you do a Loft between profiles that have a different number of segments in them (in this case 1 segment for the circle, and 4 segments for the end piece), MoI will do a kind of averaging process to merge the different shapes together.

MoI is not able to analyze the shapes to such an extent to realize exactly how different pieces should be mapped. You've got to help it by splitting things up into pieces so that there is a simple "1 to 1" segment matching.

Like Jamie mentions, you want to use Trim to split the circle up into pieces to enable this.

Once the circle is split, then you can either use Separate on the other piece and do the Lofts in pairs, or you can also use Edit/Join to join the circle together into 1 curve which will now have 4 segments inside of it, and then do one loft between each of the 4-segment pieces. When the loft sections have the same number of segments, they will get matched segment-to-segment.


But yes if you want to merge different shaped pieces together in a loft you will likely need to split things up so that you have more control over exactly what portions are being matched between the 2 profiles.

It would sort of take some kind of advanced artifical intelligence pattern matching to try and do that automatically, I don't have much hope of being able to produce that anytime soon... ;)

- Michael

Hello Jamie,

I have all the components ready, it's just a matter of sizing and making the equipment easily modular in nature, something that is requested often but not available.

MG, I thought you were adding brain link AI to version 3? (grin)