How can I pick up a single vertex from a 3D solid and move it?

Hofstede

Hi,
I need to find a way to edit 3D solids and be able to snap one or more vertexes to (an)other point(s) withoud changing the 3D solid into polyface meshes. Alternatively it would also be oke to find a way to turn polyfacemeshes back into a 3D solid. At the moment I use 3DCONVERT to turn a 3D solid into Polyface meshes and edit them like that but I cant turn them back into a 3D solid, I saw an application from Automapki called ''Automesher application'' which claims to be able to do this (convert meshes to solids and solids to meshes) but cannot find reliable information on it and all youtube movies are old and work with brics v13, I am using brics v18 platinum.
Thanks for any and all effort towards solving this problem

Michael Mayer

I "repair" Meshes to Solids by :

• Explode
• Select Faces
• Create Regions
• Select Regions
• Stitch
  (+ Simplify)

But never tried komplex Geometry so far.
As manipulating individual Vertices easily creates non-planar Faces.
Perhaps not valid for a necessary Region.

Tom Foster

@Michael Mayer said:
manipulating individual Vertices easily creates non-planar Faces.

Not necessarily - can create additional flat (or otherwise geometric) faces and arrises.
Can remain a 'simple' solid like that, or even a 'trick' solid that has more amorphous non-planar face(s).

Michael Mayer

With Solids you can old school Taper Faces, which is similar to
new school Direct Modeling in Edge Selection and Moving an Edge.

With Parasolid, Microstation's PushPull odes Faces and Edges or Vertices.
Also Parasolid, Vectorworks does not. But added Pixar's Free SubD
Meshes. Which can be converted into Solids after creation and
manipulation.

I have not found a way in Bricscad to manipulate Solids the way it was
asked for.
But I tested a Mesh.
You can create Regions - and so Solids - from Meshes with "non planar"
faces. Like when you pull 1 Vertex of a Cube away.
They always stay planar, as just being triangulated.

The Simplify Command will finally reduce extra triangulation where not
needed.

Tom Foster

So you think Brics inability to 'pull' vertices, compared to Microstation, is due to Parasolid vs whatever MS uses (I forget)?

Michael Mayer

Bricscad, like ACAD, uses ACIS Solid Core.

What I wanted to say is, I doubt it has to do with those 3D Cores.
I think they offer nearly everything and it is about what the developers
choose to implement in the software.
uStation and VW are both using Siemens Parasolid, but uStations 3D Solid
Tools are far superior and extended. And my knowledge is from a state at
least a decade ago when I stopped my service contract vs my current VW
release.

So beside priorities and complexity of integration,
I think very likely that Vertex Manipulation "could" be implemented.

In the previous post I told about the options I see in current Bricscad.
Little Solid manipulation by Edge moving or Taper + Ability to "convert"
Meshes back to Solids
Maybe someone has an additional idea ?

Hofstede

@Michael Mayer said:
I "repair" Meshes to Solids by :

• Explode
• Select Faces
• Create Regions
• Select Regions
• Stitch
  (+ Simplify)

But never tried komplex Geometry so far.
As manipulating individual Vertices easily creates non-planar Faces.
Perhaps not valid for a necessary Region.

Thanks, it's a bit of a work around but it works fine

Michael Mayer

Yes, there may be more comfortable ways to achieve that
(A complex Macro backed into a new Tool from Bricscad's side ?)
but one gets used to it.
I need that all the time to repair things from exchange with Vectorworks.
Therefore I even added all 4 buttons beside each other in a toolbox of
my partial UI.

When you apply it to many objects or whole Layers,
Stitch will fail when Object's Faces are touching or their vertices share
location and you will get Surfaces only instead of Solids.

Patrik Sparrman

@Hofstede Isnt this what you want to do ??

Richard Webb

Have you tried using _dmdeformpoint (Deform Point)? Experiment with it and use with care. The command can produce some impossible results (e.g., one can pull a point through to the other side of a solid) but it can also make some otherwise impossible (or at least very difficult) modeling operations quite easy.

Roy Klein Gebbinck

Attached is a small Lisp routine that wraps the steps outlined by Michael into a single command (BKG_PfmToSol).

Hofstede

@Hofstede Isnt this what you want to do ??

Hi Patrick, yes it is but on a single vertex and not an edge. When I try doing what is shown in de Gif I just move the 3D solid, what else other than just enable select edges did you do?

@Roy Klein Gebbinck said:
Attached is a small Lisp routine that wraps the steps outlined by Michael into a single command (BKG_PfmToSol).

Thanks I'll try it out later today.

@Richard Webb said:
Have you tried using _dmdeformpoint (Deform Point)? Experiment with it and use with care. The command can produce some impossible results (e.g., one can pull a point through to the other side of a solid) but it can also make some otherwise impossible (or at least very difficult) modeling operations quite easy.

Thanks I'm trying some stuff with it, but I can't seem to snap to another vertex and getting some weird reactions sometime I'll keep looking into it.

Tom Foster

@Tom Foster said:
So you think Brics inability to 'pull' vertices, compared to Microstation, is due to Parasolid vs whatever MS uses (I forget)?

@Michael Mayer said:
Bricscad, like ACAD, uses ACIS Solid Core.

OK I'm corrected, but is inability to 'pull' vertices due to the different Solids Cores, MS vs Acad/Brics?

Michael Mayer

I don't think so.
As far as I know those 3D cores are very capable and can do nearly anything.
A specific software will just implement a part of these features that they think
are useful and needed.
I think the effort of implementing such a feature is to build the Tool, UI and
connection to the model data around that feature.