Quickly Rebuild Controls (CageEdit)?

Is there a quick way to rebuild a control without having to:

ReleaseFromCage
Explode
Rebuild
CageEdit pause PreserveStructure=Yes pause Enter
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Hi Eric - no, not that I know of. However, you might want to (in V8) ExtractOriginalCaptives, in at least some cases where structure has not been preserved, to avoid cage editing an obect that has already been refit by previous cages.

-Pascal

I’m experimenting trying to solve another problem, smoothing out the UV’s of a FlowSrf target:

I’m not sure this would even work, but I’m trying to massage the control points with CageEdit’ing.
I’m thinking the best way is to slowly increase the degree of a single span crv, i.e. 2/3 → 3/4 → 4/5 etc.

Hi Eric- what does MakeUniform do here?

-Pascal

That won’t help here (they’re already uniform). There are two problems with this kind of surface:

  1. Scaling - If you imagine the linear distance between knots as a curvature graph, it would be very spikey. That causes weird scaling throughout the surface, rather than limiting it to areas with a high rate of change (i.e., where the srf bends from vertical to horizontal):

  1. Deformation - The perfect target surface would have perpendicular UVs, like with a developable srf. When you add in a second direction, you have to keep the skew of the UVs to a minimum to avoid unwanted deformation (twisting, stretching, etc.).

Hey Eric,

Sorry to chime in without answer to your question, I was curious about the workflow your described in your first comment.

In V7 when you explode a control cage, you get a “NURBS cage” (first time I see that). And then _Rebuild doesn’t take this nor the original control as a target. What do you rebuild exactly, is there an intermediary step you didn’t mention ? I’d be very interested to learn a workflow to rebuild control cages.

I was using a curve as the cage, not a bounding box. I was trying to find a way to edit a curve with very dense control points smoothly. Look at the second picture in the 3rd post.

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mh I see, thank you, I misunderstood