How to Select NurbsCurve(s) in a drawing

Well, if this is going to be a SelectionFilter on steroids, it’s going to be a monster. There are already 12 different object types in there and those are just the basics. Then you need to multiply that by the number of possible attributes an object can have - which are also in the dozens. So that’s going to be a huge dialog full of checkboxes, number fields, color picker, layer picker, etc. Will people use it? I have no idea.

Being an old tool guy (with an emphasis on the “old”), the axiom I learned from my junior high school shop teacher that has always stuck with me is “A tool specifically designed for the job is always better than a combination tool”. In that sense I have a dozen or so most used specific selection tools (scripts) as aliases or toolbar buttons that are instant-access with no dialog. For the rest, some odd combination I might need for one specific job, that is when I might want to use your tool. Now, if that tool would allow creating macros for specific combinations and use them via aliases or toolbar buttons, that could be cool.

I’d say generally users should not need to care if a curve is NURBS or not. I don’t know why the OP needs to - there is no doubt a good reason, but I don’t know what it is.

-Pascal

Hi,

The reason is:
We cut cnc aluminium parts and we rebuild the curve’s with a script to arcs and lines (file size as small as possible) but sometimes a customer send us drawings and there are lines and arc’s not on c-plane so we project but after a curve (arc) can turn into a nurbs-curve and our nesting software and our g-code what we build and use in Rhino don’t like nurbs-curve’s.
Also if we get a drawings where it looks oke but it isn’t.
Now I have a tool to it check fast, for the people who are prepairing the drawings.
Again many thanks and I reccomend rhino always because of the help we get on the forum

Hi Edward, it is worth trying SimplifyCrv on these to denurbsify them.

-Pascal

I just spent about four months writing a plugin that is basically a replacement for the ‘What’ command and ‘Details’ button on the property form. (Xray - yes, I could have done better on the name)

The McNeel people said that including downwards class hierarchy docs for RhinoCommon (‘Tell me what all of the subclasses of Curve are.’) wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, so this past weekend I did it.

So: no, I’m not speculating- I enjoy finding effective ways to present information that people need. These are the kinds of things that I think can greatly improve the user experience, particularly non-expert user experience, in Rhino.

It’s closer to 60 objects/classes to code for just counting the interesting classes under GeometryBase and ModelComponent :slight_smile:. That doesn’t intimidate me and I think that tree views can let the user see only the level of complexity that they actually need to.

I think the UI can be one flat, nonmodal form except, perhaps, for really specialist controls like a layer picker.

Me too. In developing tools, I force myself to recognize that I’m (we’re) not like other users. You have a “dozen or so” scripts aliased or toolbuttoned and a knowledge of how to quickly modify/extend them as required plus 20 years of supporting knowledge of the Rhino object model and what the keywords are for half-remembered forum posts to guide you if required: that is wildly atypical.

I’m closer to targeting your students and middle level users.

Two questions I see relatively often in the fora are:

  1. “Tell me about this object I selected.” which may be a direct question or part of troubleshooting when a command or process fails. The ‘what’ command is severely underwhelming: modal so it doesn’t fit into the flow, not a neat table format so finding information is a visual challenge and it’s not easy to copy/paste from a what window for several items, and there’s too little information. This is Xray.

  2. “How do I find this thing?” It might be valid solids, unclosed surfaces, things with an unfortunately large Brep tolerance, curves/surfaces with a degree greater than 3, things that are arcs (whether they’re an actual arc object, a nurbs curve which is geometrically equivalent to an arc), etc. It could also be something nongeometrical like “I named the commercially available parts. How do I find all of the instances of ‘M2*Machine Screw’ parts?”

I’m not opposed to letting people embed scripts; I just haven’t seen or researched examples for using RhinoCommon to start up scripts with supplied context from a plugin or other scripts. In my current context (viewer, not editor), it seems pretty safe to allow that as well because there wouldn’t be any conflicts between in-flight changes.

I’m not positive that there’s a market, but it really seems to me that there’s a need.