Why aren’t you calculating how many of these you need from the document tolerance? Why leave it up to the user?
Also, any plans to allow G0 on some sides?
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Why not make this kind of commands for the generation of surfaces more interactive (including guides and handles where the operator can manually intervene on the model, on the surfaces, as it was implemented in the defunct VSR plug-in, for example).
For these tools, in my opinion, we should look at other much more mature and consolidated Cad, and do in a similar way; it is useless to propose incomplete and lacking “original” solutions.
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We’re still in early phases of the development of this tool. I agree that in general we need to move UI more into the viewport. Ui work is quite labor intensive. It makes sense to start work on that once the tool is a bit further consolidated.
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I have no doubt about it. Mine was meant to be a humble suggestion.
Good work and let’s hope that when Rhino 9 comes out we will have a convincing tool, on a par with the one implemented in the famous Cads.
If you use an ordinary curve, not a surface edge, you will get G0. For now, that means if you want G0 on a surface edge, you need to use DupEdge first. This will get improved as we develop this further, with G0-G2 choices in the commandline and/or the UI for each edge.
I just uploaded a file called xnurbs-test via the uploader with some orange Xnurbs surfaces in them. I tried DupEdge but the multi sided tool still failed.
I have duplicated all edge curves that border on the orange surfaces, and in the top triangular shape, MultiSidedPatch creates a surface patch, while in the bottom shape I had to join the two tangent edges into one curve, then run MultiSidedPatch with the three curves.
If you want, I can send you the file with the results?
Oh, I see. So all edges need the same continuity as of now, got it.
Well, like I posted above, having to guess U and V complexity and only seeing if the tolerances passed or not after the tool completes makes it incredibly painful to use.
Are the wavy iso curves MultiSidedPatch produces something which will stay, you think? In one direction I guess it’s fine, but when they wobble in both it doesn’t look very appealing (although I must admit in the more difficult example, the zebra result on MultiSidedPatch seems better than the bubbly Xnurbs one, even though none of them are really usable).
I would love it if UX would be thought about from day one, so engineers can’t accumulate technical debt which then makes fast workflows difficult/impossible to implement and unusable features get pushed out the door, so people will have to go out and buy expensive plug-ins anyway in order to be able to work effectively…
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The multiblend command in VSR/Autodesk Shapemodeling (which would be somewhat comparable to Rhino’s patch) didn’t have that many interactive guides or handles to manipulate the surface.
It did have quite a few options but the resulting patch surfaces (more than 4 sided patches result in multiple patches) are of poor quality in most cases and barely usable in rare occasions.
It is by far the less useful commandof this otherwise wonderful plug-in imho.
This tool, along with several existing NURBS surfacing tools in Rhino, will benefit a lot by adding two buttons or Command line options called “Add edge” and “Remove edge” (both, edges and curves should be selectable).
The lack of these two options makes the use of some of the existing tools extremely cumbersome, forcing the user to cancel the command and start picking the input edges from the beginning.
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Contest. Maybe it wasn’t very interactive, you’re right, I remember badly…
Then we should look at other Cad, like UGS Nx, Catia and, maybe, I would add also Plasticity.
No they do not, you can mix G0 and G1 curves as long as the G0 are normal curves and G1 are surface edges. But in your case, which I won’t show here, the G0 continuity was required on all edges.
This is a matter of improving how the surface domain is chosen. This is now done in a very simple way: use a regular polygon in UV. When I get around to improving this by either projecting or unrolling space curves to parameter curves, the wavyness of the iso curves will be reduced.
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