V3Beta
Release notes for each V3 beta release are gathered here.
Aug-24-2011
New Flow command (Transform > Deform > Flow, no icon yet) for deforming objects from one "backbone" to another, some examples in these forum posts: [1] [2]
New selection indicator in the scene browser - shows a yellow dot on the right hand side to show if an item has selection or not, also now click on that spot to select or deselect things in the scene browser. Also you can use Ctrl+click on that same spot to set a selection filter which is also new. Some more descriptions here: [3] [4]
Major overhaul to many internals - the UI is now based off of WebKit/JavaScriptCore instead of mshtml.dll/JScript.dll , updated to new OpenNURBS v5 library for reading 3DM files - this enables reading of Rhino v5 files and should round trip stuff like extended layer properties to Rhino v4 better. Also updated to the newest release of the Solids++ geometry library which has some various bug fixes in it. There may be some regressions due to all this various library churn, let me know if something that worked in v2 doesn't seem to work in v3.
Oct-25-2011
New Twist command (Transform > Deform > Twist, no icon yet) for deforming objects by twisting them around an axis line. Some examples in this forum thread: [5]
New "Projective" option for Flow which can help for applying objects on to a localized area of a target object more like a decal rather than covering the entire surface like regular Flow. See here for a description: [6]
Updated Flow to pay attention to where you click on each surface to control how to match the results up - you click near the end of an edge on each surface and UVs will be flipped or swapped as needed to make those areas aligned, see this post for some more description: [7]
Added a "Flip surface normal" checkbox option to Flow so you can flip the result in the vertical surface normal direction if it is reversed from what you need.
Updated STL export for object names - if there is a single object being written to the STL file and it has a name, that name will be written as the object label in the file instead of just the generic "OBJECT".
New construction line snap plane feature - you can now make a "quick snap plane" by drawing 2 construction lines that share the same start point. Then when you snap on to that start point you can draw planar shapes like a circle from center point or rectangle from center and it will align perpendicular to those 2 crossing construction lines. It's also possible to use this to get a vertical straight snap line along that perpendicular as well. Some discussion in the forum here: [8] and some animated examples of its use here: [9]
Updated LWO export with an option for LightWave v10 style vertex normals - it seems that with LightWave v10 LW expects to see normals reversed in direction from LW 9.6 used. So now there are options for storing normals for Modo, LightWave 9.6 or LightWave 10, they each expect to see the normals in a slightly different coordinate system.
Updated scene browser text label display - clipped text so that a long text name won't overlap underneath the selection indicator area unless the selection indicator is going to be empty.
Fixed a bug in curve-to-curve Flow where it didn't work correctly unless both curves were in the world x/y plane.
Fixed a bug where the bounding box was not computed correctly for some kinds of curves imported from .ai files.
Fixed a bug where sliders did not work properly if the system locale used a comma as the decimal point separator.
Fixed a bug where an ignorable assert warning could pop up for some intersection object snap cases.
Fixed a regression bug in the geometry library that was causing some cases of "On surface" object snap to fail on some surfaces of revolution.
Fixed a regression bug in the geometry library that could cause extrusion to fail of planar surfaces that were actually made up of numerous control points instead of being simple planes.
Fixed a bug in accurate bounding box calculation on some kinds of surfaces that have an outwards flaring shape to them.
Fixed a problem where you couldn't use JPEG images in the UI, you could only use PNG. Now you can use any of PNG, JPEG, or GIF for images in any custom HTML UI.
Fixed a crash bug where running out of memory in one particular spot in mesh calculation would crash instead of giving the "Insufficient memory" warning message.
Fixed a bug where the previous window position was incorrectly still used with a different monitor arrangement when moving a laptop between docking stations, bug reported in the forum here: [10]
Fixed a bug with filtering on multi-style solids not working as expected reported in the forum here: [11]
