[W.I.P.] Curve Tools plugin

[Dimitri]

The path array idea is very good indeed!

Waiting for a downloadable version to test the plugin...

[KrisBee]

Very nice

[micheus]

The drawing in black issue I pointed in post#30 was fixed.

Working on Lathe stuff. The code I used to built the strips worked fine in some situations to build the lathe object, but only if we want it to have a hole.


I have to build a new one that takes in account those vertices sat in the rotation axis.
Do not need to unwrap these kind of object is the most.

[oort]

Micheus,
I new you would be able to get the drawing in black issue fixed...

Thanks for your continued work on this. The addition of lathe will be nice, especially with the automatic uv unwrap. I can't remember the last time I have been able to spend any time using Wings3D... I do still stop by every day to see what is happening in the forum.

Thanks again,
oort

[Neon22]

Micheus,
I just checked back in and this looks fantastic. I was playing with splines etc recently in pyglet and made some possibly related progress. You might be able to use some of it. The spherical interpolation in quaternions and conversion between euler and quats might be useful for eliminating the gimbal lock spins in the wires (normals and tangents etc).
Look in quaternions.py here: https://gitlab.com/pyglet_addons/interpolations
The rest of the code in that repo is not useful for you yet - I will check in my splines code and ping you when its up in a day or two.

On a side note you will probably have already worked out that your wire can be used as a trajectory (orientable wire with look-ahead) and that a cute way to visualise it is to draw it as a ladder strip so you can see the banking visually. Bruce Steele made a useful plugin for the Symbolics S-Geometry in 1988 for this but I've lost the code(was in s-hacks). Your strip post reminded me of that.

Personally I found lofting between closed sets of wires - spread out along the Z(say) axis super useful for making objects. Don't forget to allow mirror operations on wires for symmetry.

[micheus]

You might be able to use some of it. The spherical interpolation in quaternions and conversion between euler and quats might be useful for eliminating the gimbal lock spins in the wires (normals and tangents etc).
Look in quaternions.py here: https://gitlab.com/pyglet_addons/interpolations
The rest of the code in that repo is not useful for you yet - I will check in my splines code and ping you when its up in a day or two.

On a side note you will probably have already worked out that your wire can be used as a trajectory (orientable wire with look-ahead) and that a cute way to visualise it is to draw it as a ladder strip so you can see the banking visually. Bruce Steele made a useful plugin for the Symbolics S-Geometry in 1988 for this but I've lost the code(was in s-hacks). Your strip post reminded me of that.

thanks for these info's. The "crazy" torcions sometimes appears are no so frequent now. I also noticed them in others apps as I have been watching some videos - so, by now, I will not give them too much attention.

Personally I found lofting between closed sets of wires - spread out along the Z(say) axis super useful for making objects. Don't forget to allow mirror operations on wires for symmetry.

I want to make that kind of loft available too, but I will need to work in transpose the Wings3d code that is used to pick multiple objects - in my case, curves. That should allow us to pick vectors too, but it's still not priority.
I also want to implement mirror option, but I'm going to need the same stuff for that.

As I have been saying, it's like I was creating a wings3d app inside Wings3D to work with curves. It'll take long time to get everything ready. So, I'm working on the basics and then we can have something with some useful to start and we can go increasing options further.

[micheus]

After a pause to fix some bugs and do some Wings3D tests I'm back to working on my plugin. The Lathe command seems to be fine now:


To make easy to help dgud to test the new changes/fixes and to continue working on my plugin I decided to rewrite the render code in order to use the new shader stuff that needs to be tested. So, that means no version for evaluation will be available before the new Wings3D release be public.

[micheus]

Guys, I've thinking about how Duplicate should to work here and I would like to know how do you think it would to be better it to work.

The plugin uses two kind of elements: the curve and the object created using it.
One curve allow us to create many objects over it and one object is "attached" to only one curve (by now).
Duplicating an object will always result in duplicate the curve which defines it, but duplicating a curve should to result in duplicate as many objects attached to it?
Yes, No or should that be asked to the user?

Also, when the parametric object be set to be made permanent - a Wings3D object will be created -, should the curve be automatically deleted, kept or, again, the user asked?

[Dimitri]

I think that when we duplicate the object it has to be duplicated without the curve. The same should apply for the curve also: when we duplicate it, it must be duplicated alone, without any object attached to it. I think that this is the most natural way of working.

[tkbd]

Micheus,
I drew an illustration about the each duplication behaviors.
https://gyazo.com/87725bb0a49707541e4b8bf25b4c5350
Is my understanding correct?
If so,I think it natural.


Also,I think nessesary that ask user whether curve keep when make the parmanent object.
I would be want to reuse the curves at anytime if that situation.
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tkbd