Biplab

In the constraint palette, double click on the Snap To Object button - and turn on Snap to Edge points.

At this point there is no point cloud functionality in the program.

Please visit www.3dpowerpack.com to see examples and tutorials of revolve with rail. The main difference with simple revolution is that, in simple revolution, the path along which the profile rotates about the axis is always circular. In revolve with rail, the profile can rotate about an axis and at the same time follow a non-circular rail curve.

Tapered extrude created from a NURBS curve profile could be of some use here. When you edit the Tapered Extrude using edit group, the orientation would be matching, though the profile origin would be shifted to world (0, 0) - thus offset from the surfaces (turn display other objects while inside group ON). Perhaps not a good solution.

As these plugins are not developed by NNA I cannot comment much on the results. But as far as I know, the SDK calls that they make haven't changed much for the objects that you have in the examples. It seems to me that the bottom cap is getting a wrong orientation somehow.

In the above message I meant to write... Double click on the Snap to Object button on the contrain palette.

In VW10.5, I think you can snap to points on another object while reshaping. As you might have noticed, you can snap to the control points of the NURBS curves (hint comes up as "Point"). You can also snap to any point of a NURBS curve. Double click on the Snap to Object button in the grid palette. You will get a dialog - turn on the snap to Edge Point - and you should be snapping to all points.

What version of VW are you using? VW10.5 has 3D snapping features that might help.

You may want to post this query on the general discussions tech board rather than this one.

The file size would reduce depending upon what you have in the file. Convert to generic solid only works on Add/Subtract/Intersect/Section Solid, Fillet, Shell objects. Unless you have these types of objects - you won't see any reduction at all.

As you might have noticed that the shell tool creates the resultant shapes by offsetting original surfaces and opening up the selected surfaces. For complicated lofted surfaces, creation of the offset surfaces may take a long time. The only way to bring about better performance is to come up with lofted surface shapes that you want with less number of control points. This in turn is related to the curves that you are lofting with. For instance you might want to replace some of the NURBS curves with a large number of vertices with approximating curves that has less number of control points.

Yes, if there are discontinuous pieces.

There are some technical issues to do this for the curves - nevertheless - this is very much in our list. The technical issue is the fact that a NURBS curve can have several pieces (some linear, some curvy with sharp corners between them). So when you select a bunch of vertices - you are actually reshaping several pieces together which makes the problem a little complicated.

I would say that your concerns are not justified. The model in VectorWorks is stored with precision similar to any other production quality CAD program. The surface may appear "irregular" as you say - but the internal geometry stored is quite high quality. You can control the visual aspect by changing 3D conversion resolution from low to high or very high in the VectorWorks preferences. And even if the visual aspect is coarse, the snapping mechanism, and other functionality still works with the exact model.

What I mean by "Fit Points" is - use the NURBS curve tool in the default mode (NURBS curve by interpolation points) mode. The other mode is NURBS curve by control points mode. Using interpolation points mode, the NURBS curve passes thru the points clicked.

Tom wrote: "However, what little I've done with NURBS in v9.5 leaves me less than satisfied. For example, I need to loft a precise airfoil surface using 2 or more section profiles originally entered as 2D loci. While the 2D "compose curve" command does an acceptable job converting the loci to smooth curves, the subsequent "convert to NURBS" (required for lofting the 3D surface) introduces too much distortion. How might one go about this in 10.5 to obtain an accurate NURBS airfoil profile from a 2D locus? Please note that the airfoil has a nonuniform chord length, so a simple "extrude" or "tapered extrude" command will not work." If I understand the problem correctly, you are probably joining the 2D loci with linear segments and then composing them. You cannot just compose 2D loci. And then you are converting the resulting polyline into NURBS curve using Convert To NURBS. You might also want to use the NURBS curve tool with the "Fit Points" mode, and click on the 2D loci to create the NURBS curve directly. Sorry if I misunderstood the question.

Ron R wrote: "I still am a little unclear about how to get two NURBS curves to intersect reliably (as in using them to Create Surface from Curves). I can position the vertex of both lines with the keyboard at the same position to the level of precision specified for the drawing, but still not have them intersect. If anyone can clue me in I'd appreciate it." I think the way to create intersecting curves is to use the new 3D snapping features available in VW10.5. Let's say you have the curves flowing in the U-direction. And you are now creating curves that flow in the V-direction. Using the NURBS tool when you create these curves you can snap to the U-curves at any point on the curve. On the curves you can snap to any point on the curve, the control points/fit points and to the center if it's a circular curve.

In VW10.5 you can convert a solid to generic solid which may reduce the file size considerably. So generic solids are easier to e-mail around.

The Add becomes Subtract and vise versa because the solids you have may be "Inside out". This kind of solid may have been created becuase of a flaw in the modeling engine that we use. In some cases, entering the solids all the way in and exiting out regenerates the solid and cures the problem.

Once you create the protrusion or cutout, they can be edited using Edit Group as before. The thing that is added or subtracted is actually a tapered extrude, that can be entered, it's profile changed etc. So to answer your question, protrusion/cutout tool generates editable geometry.

As I mentioned before, your first problem should be fixed in VW10.5

Thanks BaRa. Visit 3dpowerpack.com and you can see some cool parts and movies on the exciting new 3D capabilities.

Problem 2 mentioned in Kristen's mail will be fixed in a future release.

u and v are the parametric directions. Imagine you have a rectangular surface. The parameters at the bottom left may be [u = 0, v = 0] and parameters at the top right may be [u = 1, v = 1]. You can also imagine a tubular surface and the imagine the length of the tube is in the u parametric direction. One might then say that the surface is closed in v (i.e. in v parametric direction]. In VW, only places you see these are the OIP coordinate changes. Also Reverse Normal in OIP reverses the u direction of the surface.

Well there are some tricks that you can apply. Render the surface in shaded polygon mode and you will be able to select any point on the surface rather than just the wireframe isoparametric curve points. Extract toll should also have a extract iso-parametric curve mode in the future.