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Old 17th September 2007, 04:43 AM   #1
coldby
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 102
Smile A few features I'd like to ask Santa Claus for

AC3D remains my favourite 3D drawing program: easy and straightforward, does almost everything, gives very few bad surprises. Maybe it's more like a jeep then like a Rolls-royce, but who needs a Rolls when it comes to doing something really meaningful?

Still there are a few things I'd dearly like to see added:

- a "full merge" feature:
1. merge together two or more objects
2. snap together vertices by distance
3. optimize vertices
4. optimize surfaces
5. combine complanar surfaces after adding the required vertices
All with a single keystroke or mouse click.

- snap groups by vertices:
in "vertex" mode all you can snap into position so far are objects, because the "group" mode must be exited.

- an easy way to assign a few custom buttons (or custom keystrokes) to some frequently used functions. I think that there is a plug-in to do that but I never succeeded getting it to work properly - probably my fault, but still...

Why thank you, Andy Claus!

coldby

P.S.: I'm not asking to pay for it; yet since over one year I'm constantly milking new versions, plugins and things for free, and feel that I might as well offer something in return. Thus I wouldn't complain too loud if the next upgrades had a decent price > $ 0.00
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Old 20th September 2007, 05:06 AM   #2
coldby
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Join Date: Jun 2006
Posts: 102
Default Do it yourself

OK, this seems to be a funny discussion between me and myself, still somebody might profit from it.

I finally succeded getting rid of my cowardice and rolling up my sleeves. I managed to get Dennis' Toolbar Editor to work - the problem was in downloading Microsoft .Net 2.0 Framework, which apparently requires Internet Explorer while I was stubbornly trying to do it with Netscape; then everything run smoothly, it's a great utility. Thanks again, Dennis!

Fully ignorant of TCL as I am, after some tampering I got to learn what the single strings did, although not how or why (more or less the way physicians have been using aspirin for nearly a century), and finally produced the attached 'toolby.tcl' that, when placed in the AC3D scripts folder, seems to solve part of the problems mentioned in my previous post: the "SnapV" button nicely snaps two objects together without having to fumble through the menus, and the FullMerge button merges them, snaps the common vertices together by distance (the latter must be previously set by hand once forever), optimizes vertices, optimizes surfaces - a silly but effective macro.
I found no way to get rid of the two pop-up windows that tell how many vertices and surfaces have been removed, but pressing 'Enter' twice is no big deal.

Still combining together all co-planar surfaces of the resulting object requires something better than my blind script-fumbling: some vertices may not be shared between contiguous surfaces (e.g. if one surface is shorter), other surfaces may lay in the same plane and be contiguous but produce weird results if combined together (e.g. if the resulting surface had a hole in the middle), and so on. To be done properly this would take plenty of intelligent programming.
Andy, you still there?
Attached Files
File Type: tcl toolby.tcl (2.4 KB, 283 views)
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