Wishes for the Edge continuity toolease

  1. Make it easier to pick surface edges. Currently, each edge pair requires at least two mouse clicks, sometimes even 4 or 5 mouse clicks, because there may be other nearby objects shown in the “Selection menu” pop-up window, even if the latter are 5-10 mm away from the area where the mouse pointer was located upon the mouse click. I think that this is good in certain situations if there are multiple surface edges in the same area. However, in most cases, there are only two adjacent edges. Rhino should implement some sort of an alternative (optional, with a tick box) way for selection approximation that will add nearest adjacent surfaces that are within 1 mm away from the first manually picked surfaced edge. Of course, that value could be customizable to set a larger or smaller number.

  2. Cross-selection of an edge pair is also possible now, but sometimes it does not work (especially if the control points are visible). I think that being able to assidentaly select control points after pressing the “Add edge pair” button is counter-intuitive, and that should be fixed.

  3. Add a button “Remove good pairs”. This should let the user remove all edge pairs that meet the criteria, based on which continuity type is selected. For example, if the continuity type is set to “Tangency”, then pressing the “Remove good pairs” button should exclude all the active markings that show 0,00 degrees. Thus, only the edge pairs that show deviation will remain active.

  4. Enable edge continuity analysis between one large edge adjacent to two or more smaller edges. Currently, the tool does not support that. Only one edge analysis point could be assigned to each surface edge.

  5. Allow a manual placing of an extra analysis point along an edge pair. It must be possible to slide it along the entire shared edge gap freely, so that the user could analyze that particular spot even if there is a larger gap between the two adjacent edges in another location.

  6. Similar to the above wish, but enable multiple analysis points along an edge pair spaced at equal distance. The user must be able to specify the total number of those points and whether they will be applied to a single edge pair or all edge pairs. Also, the user must be able to remove those multiple analysis points with some button.

  7. Improve the way the mouse scroll wheel changes the value inside the scale field. Currently, each step of the mouse scroll wheel changes the value by 1, which is really sluggish if the scale is 100 or 1000. In my opinion, each step of the mouse scroll wheel should change a larger number, such like 10 or 100. Example: jumping from 100 to 110 or 200, or from 1000 to 1100. If one wants to adjust the scale by 1 digit, there are the dedicated tiny arrows at the right side of the numerical field.

  8. Bring back the one-click selection between Distance, Tangency, and Curvature that worked so well in Rhino 7. Unfortunately, that was changed in Rhino 8 into two-click action that is counter-productive. Sure, it saved some space in Rhino 8, but the negative aspect of that change is that now it requires one extra mouse click.
    Tip: add two arrows on the right side, just like the other fields. That way, changing from “Distance” to “Tangency”, or from “Tangency” to “Curvature” could be done via a single mouse click. :smiley:

2 Likes