Looking for a Slice/Loop tool

Khai · 8 Jul 2009, 20:47

anyone know a ruby for drawing a loop round a mesh? (on most modelers it's a polygon slice or similar)

kind of like Zorro but without the cutting part...unless zorro can do it and I missed that bit..

mitcorb · 8 Jul 2009, 21:00

Well,
I was hoping that Thomthom was working on this in his Selection Toys. Apparently not available yet. This would be great for progressive subdividing, extrusion and scaling.

May I suggest in the meantime to create a slicing plane, say a circle, that you can copy and place in position where you desire the loop, select it and the adjacent geometry, intersect selected, and this should create edges where the circular plane intersects. Then align your camera view near the horizon for box selection of the new loop, invoke scale and reshape the loop.
Or, wait a while, and like the weather changes, there will be another answer, probably better.
best wishes,
mitcorb

Khai · 8 Jul 2009, 21:04

damn.. never thought of the intersect for that..

thanks!

TIG · 8 Jul 2009, 21:13

@khai said:

anyone know a ruby for drawing a loop round a mesh? (on most modelers it's a polygon slice or similar)
kind of like Zorro but without the cutting part...unless zorro can do it and I missed that bit..

My slicer.rb slices groups/instances to determined spacing/thicknesses; choosing something that's v.thin and only once in the height would give you a slice ? OR my FaceSectionCut script adds faces to a selected section cut... so make the section cut and use that ? OR my ContourMaker script makes similar horizontal cut edges at given c/c... ?

mitcorb · 8 Jul 2009, 22:29

@Khai:
See what I mean?
@TIG:
Thanks, TIG. Could you provide some links for Khai?

Gaieus · 9 Jul 2009, 10:51

Slicer3 in the Extensions index (hope you don'tmind me "pushing" the Index but it's so easy to use and find anything in seconds)

Khai · 9 Jul 2009, 11:08

thanks for suggesting slicer, but thats not what I'm looking for.. it's good, but I need 1 slice put exactly where I need it..
right now I'm manually tracing round the mesh with the draw tool to place the slices I need to put in.

to give an example, to put a bulge round the middle of a cylinder, I draw in the line round the middle then use that to guide the followme tool... the tool I'm looking for, in trueSpace, I'd draw one line where I want the loop to be, then it draws the rest of the loop round the mesh based on that line.
bascially like the zorro tool but without the cutting.

TIG · 9 Jul 2009, 11:15

Make the thing a Group.
Locate it's bottom at Z=0
Measure the height of the bulge [or whatever] using the tape measure tool - let's say it's 1234mm.
Use the 'ContourMaker' tool and set the contour interval to 1234mm.
The new group containing the contour will be made at that point [if the thing is taller then the higher contours at 2468mm etc can easily be erased].
You now have a group containing a 'loop' through the bulge [or whatever]...

'ToolsOnSurface' tool might also help draw a line around something...

mitcorb · 9 Jul 2009, 12:04

Not to cloud the issue, but see here: http://forums.sketchucation.com/viewtopic.php?f=180&t=20267

There appears to be some problem with creating/marking loops composed of edges when the path meets a junction of 3 or 5 edges.

takesh h · 29 Sept 2009, 02:14

@khai said:

thanks for suggesting slicer, but thats not what I'm looking for.. it's good, but I need 1 slice put exactly where I need it..

TIG, I think Khai is looking for your SectionCutFace Ruby script. Did you forget one of your own precious creations?
This is what it does.