#MOI3D SCALING PATCH#
You get better quality for things that are supposed to be smooth by making larger extended surfaces that get cut back rather than trying to fill things in patch by patch. It can be useful in limited circumstances but it's not really a winning primary modeling strategy for complex surfaces. So it's not an area that I'm particularly excited to put a lot of effort into. "Geri's Game" back in 1997 was the big turning point for this in the "DCC" / animation-oriented modeling world. It's a trend that has been going on for a long time, sub-d modeling was actually invented as an easier to use organic surface modeling strategy specifically because doing character models with NURBS patch by patch modeling is so difficult.
In general it's a strategy that has been dropped by most people doing complex surfacing in favor of Sub-d modeling. It takes a great amount of experience to deal with these problems, so it's a very high learning curve type of modeling strategy. It's also difficult to make shaping adjustments with it.
The other thing that happens is corners can be difficult, it's easy for the blend to have competition between different shapes right in corner areas. Just having G2 continuity by itself doesn't do enough, even if a surface is G2 to another right at an edge, if the surface curvature changes too much in a localized area around the boundary it will leave some visible evidence of the patch topology in the model. Hi Mauro, basically with the "fill in patch by patch" strategy it's a dying art form even in programs with multi-sided G2 continuity blending because it's so sensitive. The primary focus for MoI is more on things that I am able to actually innovate in like having quick fluid workflow. Having said that I would like to make improvements in these areas but it is difficult to know the timeframe. It isn't very practical to expect that a $300 tool made by one person is going to completely replace every other CAD tool and do everything especially in niche areas for very advanced users. If you need improvements in these areas then a practical way to do that is to use other CAD tools in combination with MoI. In fact the fundamental basis for this is already in place in MoI v4 with the SubD to NURBS conversion function that is working right now. In general sub-d modeling has a better workflow for difficult surfacing than patch-by-patch NURBS modeling, and so that will probably be more of a priority. It's something for very advanced highly technical users, which is not overall a primary target area for MoI. That's something that could also come from another library but it hasn't really been a big priority because the type of "patch filling" workflow where it would be used is just an overall delicate modeling strategy that has a very high learning curve. Re: Blending tools - no unfortunately the IntegrityWare kernel does not have a very reliable mechanism for that. There is another one that I would like to investigate too though, but since it is a fairly time consuming area of work I'm not sure when that will happen. The other library was promising but seems to have fizzled out and isn't dedicating the large time investment needed to get filleting in particular up to a high standard. That made it difficult to guarantee a totally reliable data transfer into it. I have already spent several months doing in depth investigating of 2 different libraries so far, one of them did not pan out because although it had a strong filleter it was very sensitive to slight deviations in geometry like say a 0.1 degree deviation off of tangent on the seam of a closed surface.
#MOI3D SCALING LICENSE#
But since I don't want to work for 30 years on just that one area it's not really feasible for me to make a complete new fillet engine myself, it's something that I need to license from an existing library. I can fix some individual bugs in the current filleter, and in fact I did fix a couple of them near the end of v4 (at a time cost of several weeks of focused work for each one). That's something that takes a long sustained effort like 30 man years of effort before it's very good. A strong fillet engine isn't made by executing a single algorithm well, it's done by recognizing and handling a large number of special cases and corner configurations. Hi Mauro, well for filleting it's a difficult case.