>Sometimes I warn people that they might want to be careful getting started in MoI because it can make them end up unhappier with other stuff that they used to be satisfied with before! :) <

That's what is happening to me, Michael, and I'm so glad to have found such an incredibly easy-to-use program. Yesterday I was reviewing some pretty advanced tutorials written for Alias Studio Tools and I challenged myself to try and do the same things using only MOI. I was amazed: not only I reached pretty the same precision and surface quality, but also in a fraction of the time. It's incredible how those "big" apps, with all their flexible workspaces, thousands of shortcuts, zillions of parameters...seem to fall apart when it comes to a simple "intersect and trim", not being able to perform the two operations at the same time and making you waste precious time...!

And now a little request: one of the (very) few things that I had trouble reproducing is the so called "flange", that is the extrusion of an edge or of an edge loop at an arbitrary angle. It's a very useful function especially when you have to construct parting lines in a hard surface model. Is there any way round in Moi to achieve that, or is a feature you're planning to add in the future?
Thanks in advance and keep up the good work!
Daniele

Maybe with this :)

Thx Pilou, but perhaps I wasn't very clear. What I need is a tool that performs an (angled) extrusion and an offset of a set of edges. Using the "extrude dir" like in your example, all the edges are extruded in the same direction.
Regards
Daniele

like this with a thickness?

Thanks Daniele, I'm glad that MoI is working well for you!

Yeah, one of the problems with some of those larger apps is that they've kind of just added and added and added stuff over time and don't really tend to go back and tune up the basics. So some of the really basic operations (like for example say selection) just haven't been overhauled or tuned up for the last 10 years or even longer.

There are some forces that kind of push things towards that direction - there is a kind of marketing pressure to add more features to a checklist instead of going back and redoing the basic stuff.

One big problem with this is that computers are capable of a lot more stuff now than they were 10 or 20 years ago. So software that was designed 10 or 20 years ago tends to be designed to work within a lot more limited boundaries than a more modern design would target. That affects a lot of parts of how the software works, like doing stuff in wireframe instead of shaded mode, etc...

re: Flange - this is something that I should be able to add into version 2.0, I was thinking it would be some kind of tapering option inside Extrude, or possibly a full new Tapered Extrude command. This along with extrusion to a point are on my list of stuff to add to extrusion.

For now it is possible to do it manually by doing an Offset + Move + Loft. Here is an example:

Starting with this outline:



I selected it and used Offset to make an offset curve of distance 1 to the inside:



Then I selected that new offset curve and moved it up by 1 unit in z:



Now Loft between the 2 pieces:



This one was 1 unit in and 1 unit up = 45 degree angle.

You may have some difficulty in the Loft if your offset is large enough that pieces get pinched together and trimmed such that there is a different number of segments in the Offset than in the original, if that happens you'll probably need to use Edit/Separate to break them into pieces and then do smaller lofts between 2 smaller pieces at a time to make sure stuff matches up well.

Let me see - I guess if you want to specify the angle and the extrusion distance you can calculate the required offset distance by a formula which I will calculate for you after I have breakfast.

This kind of offset + move + loft is doing the manual steps of what a tapered extrude command would do bundled up for you.

- Michael

Hi Daniele - the offset distance required for a particular angle and extrusion height can be calculated by this formula: Offset dist = Height x Tan( angle )

Could you maybe answer a few questions on how you'd expect a tapered extrude to work? This would help me when I get a chance to work on it.

Do you expect a positive angle to go "outwards" and a negative angle to go inwards?

I mean like a positive 18 degrees would give this:



And -18 degrees would give this:



Or is that reversed from what you'd expect?

The angle is measured with the straight extrusion direction being 0 degrees, right?

Do these things always happen on planar curves, or is there some construction that you would expect to be able to do on a non-planar curve?

Are these always done on a closed loop, or do you need to do them on some open curves like a line segment?

On things with sharp corners, how would you expect the corners to be filled in? Like for example in this situation:





Should those corners be filled in with a little round arc type piece, or should they fill in with a straight extension to make a new sharp corner there? Is it important to switch between either one of these corner methods?

Thanks,
- Michael

Hi Michael,
now that's what I call efficiency and user-friendliness! Having the developer of your favorite software calculate formulas for you while chewing his cereals! Thank you very much, that's exactly what I needed to know!
Actually, a few hours after posting my request, I came up with the same procedure you showed me (without the offset formula though) and it works perfectly. Anyway, with particularly complex curves, I found out that it's best offsetting only the straight segments and do the blending of the corners one by one manually. That's because the offset command tends to add points in the corners. This way I make sure that the two curves that I'm gonna loft have the same number of points.

And now your questions:

>Do you expect a positive angle to go "outwards" and a negative angle to go inwards?
>Or is that reversed from what you'd expect?
>The angle is measured with the straight extrusion direction being 0 degrees, right?

Instinctively I tend to consider angle measures increasing in a clockwise direction, (with the 0 at 12 o'clock) so I'd say the reverse.

>Do these things always happen on planar curves, or is there some construction that you would expect to be able to do on a non-planar curve?

Definitely only planar curves. I don't dare to imagine what a mess should be implementing this command on nonplanar curves!!! lol

>Are these always done on a closed loop, or do you need to do them on some open curves like a line segment?
Although I use the command mostly on closed border loops it should be nice for it to work on open segments too.

>On things with sharp corners, how would you expect the corners to be filled in?
This is my wishlist:
Three options - Detached surfaces, Chamfer, Fillet
The Fillet option giving the possibility to choose the tangency (circular, G1,G2)
If this is too much, having a default chamfered result would be the best solution. The filleting can be done manually afterwards.

Hope that helps, have a wonderful day and thank you again!
Daniele