Continued developer absence

Apologies for my long periods of absence and poor attendance over the past few months, I've been reasonably busy with travelling, workshops and client visits.

I'll be at Siggraph in early August (New Orleans) and I'm throwing every available inch of development at this deadline. It's clear now that I won't be able to solve all reported bugs before then, but I would nevertheless like to release a new version in the upcoming week.

So I'd like to ask for a list of the most pertinent bugs/lacking features which need to be solved asap.

Goodwill,
David

--
David Rutten
david@mcneel.com
Robert McNeel & Associates

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 25, 2009 at 4:27pm

Hi Elizabeth,

this is already possible. Either use the menu (Solution -> Preview Selected Off/On), the shortcut keys (Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+Shift+Q) or the canvas toolbar icons if you have the latest version.

Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Tweedale on July 25, 2009 at 4:31pm

Thank you! That saves a lot of time lol.

Permalink Reply by Vittorio Menna on July 25, 2009 at 9:41pm

hi david,
first of all thank you for your massive work on gh...
i have some bugs and some wishes to share with u:
- sometimes i encounter bugs in boolean operations (union/difference), leading to strange incorrect results... in the case i m posting i m subtracting a cylinder from a single surface retrieved from a cube thru the brep components+list item tabs... i get a strange result, like the single face of the cube had the memory of the cube i took it from... i don't know if there is a mistake in my definition or it's an actual bug...

- a wish: i m often dealing with the remote panel (a very very useful tool), but i think it would be very cool to be able to sort (alphabetically at least) the sliders in the panel... sometimes when i have a lot of sliders in my definition it's not so easy to find them...
- another wish: still concerning the remote panel, is it possible to implement a save/load command to save/load slider's states? u know sometimes it would be cool to save and automatically restore different configurations and settings, instead of writing down on a paper all the values that lead to cool solutions... i know probably it's a tricky request...
anyway grasshopper is an amazing tool,
thanx david!

Attachments:

boolean_difference_bug.ghx, 83 KB

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 26, 2009 at 5:14am

Hi Vittorio,

when you bake the objects and perform a Solid Boolean using the Rhino commands do you get the same result?

It looks like some of your surfaces are merely inside out... but perhaps the problem is more significant.

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 26, 2009 at 5:50am

Never mind, I tried the file and it works exactly like it's supposed to.
The result you get (as posted in your screenshot) is the correct Boolean Difference between the face and the cylinder.

What did you expect to get?

Permalink Reply by Vittorio Menna on July 26, 2009 at 6:34am

hi david, thanx for spending time on it... i don't know, i expected just a hole in the face!

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on July 26, 2009 at 6:42am

I'm guessing he's trying to trim the cylinder. Split/trim surfaces is probably the major feature still missing as simple components. It's relatively easy to script though, but most people would welcome these components. (I'm guessing this won't be included in the next release).

Maybe the normal direction of the trimming surface could be used to select what side to keep. When splitting with curves use the perpendicular (left or right) of the curve direction.

Thanks for fixing, adding some of the features I requested. I just installed windows 7 and i'm using Rhino V5 64 bits. I did another test to paste around 9000 numbers to the number parameter. The number of copied numbers has gone up to 3338 (from around 2900), all of the 9000 numbers are properly copied in one go anywhere else (a text file, for example).

Siggraph is in 8 days, so the next release will be before then, right? I guess i'll have to take the laptop to the beach with me.

Permalink Reply by Vittorio Menna on July 26, 2009 at 7:33am

hi vicente,
as u wrote split/trim surfaces would be a nice feature to have. now to do that u have to script (u r right it's pretty easy) or just extrude the trim curve and subtract it from the surface u want to trim... this is what i m doing here: i m not trying to trim the cylinder, i m just trying to subtract the cylinder from the surface in order to get a simple circular hole in the surface, just that...

Permalink Reply by Vicente Soler on July 26, 2009 at 8:22am

That sounds like a trim, not a boolean subtraction. Subtracting works properly only for solids. In a closed brep, all of the normals are pointing to the exterior, so when you try to boolean difference some geometry to it, it splits everything up and the geomtery left outside is deleted, the inside is kept and all is joined together.

If you got a single plane, the geometry in front of the plane (normals of the plane pointing in this direction) is deleted and everything behind it is kept and joined together with the plane. Imagine the whole world behind the plane is inside the brep.
It's similar to raytracing, when you use a single surface as glass with its corresponding index of refraction, the whole world behind it would seem as if it's inside solid glass.

Permalink Reply by Vittorio Menna on July 26, 2009 at 5:27pm

thanx vicente, i didn't know that honestly! i thought i would have got just a hole in the plane, but now i understood how it works... sorry for my fake alarm!

Permalink Reply by David Rutten on July 26, 2009 at 5:29am

"is it possible to implement a save/load command to save/load slider's states?"

Do you mean you want to be able to store a number of predefined values in each individual slider (which can then be retrieved via the slider context menu), or do you want to store/restore the states of multiple sliders in one go?

Permalink Reply by Vittorio Menna on July 26, 2009 at 6:40am

it could be cool to be able to store/restore the states of multiple/all the sliders in one go... in case u want to explore different results/shapes... it's true u can bake different variations of your model but then what if u want to go back to a solution u baked after u went thru several variations? u have to write down somewhere your values and reset them in the sliders manually... i know it's a petty feature i m requesting... i m sure there r more relevant issues to put your energies on!