Hi Michael,
I was wondering if you had considered this....

Seems like a realtime revolve.. In many of the poly apps, they seem to have this as an "extrude". I realize that MoI can just draw a curve and revolve it to get the same results, but this seems like it may be more appealing to the poly/artist folks who like to eyeball it and "see it happen."



If it was possible to combine a couple things like curve drawing and revolve and extrude, that could create this "realtime" effect, this could make a couple extra tools that would fall into a poly/box modelers expectations. It just seems like "NURBS" seems scary to that side for some reason.

Any thoughts?

BurrMan what's the name of that app ? Pls :)

I believe that is Amapi ;)
But it's polygon modeler in this function

Amapi was also a nurbs modeler and has not the same appelling function when nurbs was drawing ;)

Alas the last version V8 was aborted : only some happy few have beta version!
It should have been a futur hit Poly+nurbs!

In Moi you have a similar appeling function when you edit the curve generator after a first creating surface or volume (with history enable)

Hey Frenchy,
Yes it is Amapi, although this is working in NURBS mode.. The item you see created there is a pure NURBS surface..

And yes, it is the same as a "revolve" object in MoI, with MoI having the ability to edit the input curves points and adjust the volume, although my point was that most poly modeler's, doing box type modeling, work in this fashion shown here.. There is less an emphasis on precision and more an emphasis on pulling out what "looks" good. It's not that it is a tool missing from MoI, but more that a simple combination of existing tools, could make an appealing toolset to a poly modeler. More like, "This is how it is in my poly app" kind of thing...

It wouldnt even need to be "additional" tools added in. Could just be a tick mark in Extrude/Sweep that then enables it to be tied to revolve/spline tools to create the method..


[EDIT]
""""""""""""Amapi was also a nurbs modeler and has not the same appelling function when nurbs was drawing """"""""""""""""""

I think what you may be refering to is this "sweep" method doesnt work on "Faces" when in NURBS mode. This is sweeping a "curve" in NURBS mode, which produces NURBS surfaces that can be exported out before you collapse the Dynamic Geometry, which will then convert the NURBS surfaces to Poly's...

Hi Burr, that's definitely cool but there are a lot of issues with that to consider.

You mention:

> If it was possible to combine a couple things like curve
> drawing and revolve and extrude, that could create this
> "realtime" effect

So right off the bat one big issue is which curve drawing command are you talking about, there are actually 24 different curve drawing commands in MoI, including:

Line, Polyline, Freeform curve by control points, Freeform curve by through points, Sketch, Rect by corner points, Rect by center points, Rect by 3 points, Polygon center, polygon by edge, polygon star, circle by center point, circle by 2 diameter points, circle through 3 points, circle tangent, arc by center point, arc continue, arc by 3 points, arc tangent, ellipse by center point, ellipse by diameter points, ellipse by corner points, helix, and conic...

Are you talking about making a special mode for just one of those 24 commands, or are you talking about something that would add more options to each of those 24 commands?

What about if you wanted to build a curve made up of some multiple segments using different drawing methods for each particular segment?

That's just a lot of potential complexity - the way that MoI is set up where you create some curves and then handle creating a surface once your curve creation is done avoids a lot of these issues and tends to help keep things more simple. It makes it easier for me to have a wide variety of curve editing tools like 24 different drawing tools, edit tools like trims and booleans and fillets that also work on curves, etc... The more kinds of additional functions each one of these commands that deals with curves has to try to accomplish built into it makes it more difficult to develop each one.

Doing a revolve by drawing a curve first and then making the revolve separately is also just more general purpose - what if you want to generate the profile curve by importing it from a different file, or by generating it by intersecting some surfaces together or something like that? By doing a revolve as a separate Revolve command as MoI is currently set up for, it gives that kind of total flexibility on letting you use any method that you want to get the input curves set up, instead of just one particular drawing tool... That's why some special "draw curve with revolve built in" function can't really work as the only way to make revolves, it would have to be something extra in addition to the regular revolve and extra stuff like that sort of needs to provide some fairly important functionality in exchange for the complexity and bloat that comes with the additional UI needed to control it.

- Michael

Hey Michael,
LOL with the 25 curves!

In these apps, this is called "Sweep". I was envisioning a tick mark in the sweep command, like say, "Dynamic sweep". The curve tool to use is the through points tool (Any of the others, like continuous polyline could be incorporated too)

If you look at the video, you can see on one side the pick points as a polyline, though the revolve is a through points type curve..

Again, I dont think it's introducing any functionality that MoI doesnt curently have.

I just thought it would be attractive to poly users... Probably a plugin job...

Hi Burr, so you mean you want to run any of the existing 24 curve commands while you are still running inside of the Sweep command without the Sweep command exiting? That would involve a pretty huge change to the command architecture - currently only one command can run at a time which kind of keeps things simple.

A lot of these curve commands have their own UI and various options of their own (for example "Both sides" for line, radius for a circle, etc.. etc...), so you're talking about a system where the extrude UI would kind of temporarily go away and the particular curve command that you decided to run would have its own UI swap in until you were finished?

Overall that would require a huge infrastructure change in how commands work in order to enable that little checkbox... :)

What about if you wanted to do a boolean between 2 curves or trim out a piece of a curve, would all those other commands try to be somehow active within the Sweep command as well?

How is this particular thing set up in Amapi, does it have a separate "Dynamic" checkbox that then lets you draw things within the sweep command, or is it just always set up to draw things within that particular command? And if it is always set up to draw then how does it handle if you want to select some already existing curves instead of drawing a new one?

- Michael

Hi Michael,
Although called "sweep", it seems to be more "Rail Revolve" that the input curve is drawn while in the command. So , pick the rail (the circle to start with) then the command is waiting for the pick points. the revolve surface is drawn in with each pick.. No 25 curve commands... Just utilizing curve through points as a method.

I guess you just touched on something with the one command at a time point.. Can the revolve command be made to work on an activly being drawn curve through points command?

Hi Burr,

> Can the revolve command be made to work on an
> activly being drawn curve through points command?

No, not currently because those are 2 completely separate commands and you can only run one command at a time.

- Michael

Hi Burr,

> Although called "sweep", it seems to be more "Rail Revolve"
> that the input curve is drawn while in the command.

What if you want to use some curve you have already previously drawn instead of drawing a new one, is there any way for it to do that, or does this particular command in Amapi actually _only_ work with points that you then pick after launching it?


> So , pick the rail (the circle to start with) then the command
> is waiting for the pick points. the revolve surface is drawn in
> with each pick.. No 25 curve commands... Just utilizing curve
> through points as a method.

So it's only fixed to use just that one particular "through points" method and not any other kind of curve drawing method? What if you want to make some lines and tangent arcs in there or something like that, are you just out of luck?

- Michael

Hi Michael,
Well, when you launch "sweep" in Amapi, you get a subset of 4 options. One acts like "Rail revolve" where you have to have a rail and then the profile curve already drawn.. Another is the "Sweep" which is what i showed. Another is "Extrude" which maintains the base shape and rotates as the extrude is picked..

""""""So it's only fixed to use just that one particular "through points" method and not any other kind of curve drawing method? What if you want to make some lines and tangent arcs in there or something like that, are you just out of luck?"""""""""""

No. Then you use the other methods where you pick the paths, just as in MoI.. This is more a dynamic, while drawing to operation. Although the "Through points" dynamic part seems to be fixed..Luike you cant change that to be "control points" type picking.

The extrude also continues as if it was a "Curve through points" picking method, until the command is ended.. I guess this seems like something underlying in the commands that was written in and that I was looking to see if you could get into MoI...

I'll make a video to show the tool in action and demonstrate what i was refering to...

Hi Burr,

> This is more a dynamic, while drawing to operation.
> Although the "Through points" dynamic part seems
> to be fixed..Luike you cant change that to be "control
> points" type picking.

That's the part that seems strange to me - that particular dynamic method sounds like it is limited to only draw a curve one in just that one particular way, by through points only. A lot of times that's actually a worse way to draw curves than control points because it tends to be easy to make kind of bulgy and wiggly shapes.

It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me to make such a kind of hard coded "one drawing method only" mechanism like that, it's lacking in flexibility.

I guess that it could be possible to make a specialized different command that would do that in MoI though (pick some points and build a curve and do a revolve on every point pick) - having it hard coded to just work with one kind of drawing method would make it a lot easier to implement as a plug-in. But it would be a lot easier to do it as some kind of new special purpose command rather than trying to incorporate it as some kind of option within the existing Sweep command.

- Michael

It just seemed how all the box modelers are working... So kindof emulating those in a NURBS sort of way..

Hi Burr,

> It just seemed how all the box modelers are working...

Not quite though - box modeling tends to work by extruding polygon faces, kind of punching an existing face outwards into a protrusion and optionally shrinking or expanding the end of it.

That's a pretty different thing than a "draw curve" / revolve type method like you've been describing.

- Michael

I guess my wording kindof confused it a bit.. You watched the video I posted? It's not drawing curves or anything.. I just drew the circle then selected it and started extruding it out.. At different points, I click to set the shape and continue on.. Just like Box modeling only on the NURBS curve and not a polygon face.. I guess it's hard to tell from a quick video with no description of what is happening..

Hi Burr, yup I watched your video - but box modeling is not normally like that, it's more about punching out different polygons to make bumps and protrusions to add smaller details to a simple initial blocky shape.

The method you're showing is not like that at all, you're not adding in local details or stuff like that (local meaning just in one small area of the model and not doing something that spans the whole circular area of the revolve), you're making one large shape there...

- Michael

Hi Burr, so another way to describe it is that "box modeling" usually means you actually start out literally with a box and then start dicing up some faces and then pull some of those faces outwards to make new protrusions to make things like arms, legs, etc...

The video that you were showing is not really very similar to that method, you're showing making a new surface of revolution starting from nothing by picking some points to create it, not modifying a box like box modeling.

- Michael

Well, there is the limitation of working on "curves" and not surfaces.. I suppose I could collapse this NURBS object into a poly object and start pushing and pulling little segments around...:o

Although, since i am working on NURBS surface, I could trim up the surface to have little edges to work with.



I could cut little eyes and lips and things, then grab those edges and box model some little detail there....

@ Bur : you were right :) My memory is some false :)
In Amapi
In Nurbs Mode you can Stretch / Extrude with just draw "the green line" and the red nurbs surface is automatically dynamically drawn at each new move / clic point :)
But I suspect that Polygons are under for screen drawing (you can see edges ;)
here a "circle" selected for extrude / Stretch (in the same time)
Stretch = vertical move
Extrude = horizontal move
Green line is the active path drawing between each clic or move of the mouse