Actions + Live Edits

[Simon]

This little twist gizmo marks the start of a new generation of commands in Curvy - the Live Edit. While Curvy has live edits for Primitives, other commands tended to be one-offs, with little in the way of control or customisation.

Actions are the new "Commands" in Curvy. A lot of the new 4.0 features work best if you can live-edit the input curves and meshes while watching the results update. This is perfect for curve-bends and deforms, but also handy for simpler operations like rotations and skews.

Being able to fine tune parameters and source objects and curves is very useful - saving lots of trial and error.

Some Actions can be left 'Live' permanently... for example an Array that makes lots of copies of an object over a surface can leave all those copies as Instances, letting you update the source object to update the instances automatically.



We've seen Proxies briefly before in Curvy - and this is a whole lot more complex - but with so many new tools and features enabled by this new method I hope to get it working well for 4.0.

[Simon]

Updated OP to show Live Edits in action, on a simple Twist action.

[Simon]

Added support for soft edged (faded) deformations, Bend and Taper.

These all work on selected parts of objects too - so you can use them for detailing too.

[granada]

that looks fantastic simon

Dave

[Simon]

With Live-Edits I can finally get some new 4.0 features working dynamically - Like this Rail Deform, where I can drag a control curve to reshape a more complex mesh the same way you would shape a Curvy Primitive.
And if you want to edit the original shape, or even swap it out with a new shape you can keep the same deformation.

[Simon]

And an example of Dual Rails. I squashed a Cube to make a simple blade shape, then reshaped it with Rails - one rail to control each side.

[Kato]

Nice work Simon! this open a lot of new possibilities when modeling.

[Simon]

Just to show Rails working on a more complex base mesh. I've skipped a few parts - and at the end I used "Redraw as Bezier" to tidy up the curves.

[Dan Silverman]

This is some great looking stuff, Simon!

[Simon]

Adding 3D controls so you can fine tune the effect of Live Edits with 3D parameters like positions and directions with the regular transform tools. These 3D controls will be rolled out to the other commands enabling all sorts of helpful edits.

For example - here is a Taper effect.

[Simon]

Added the code to Bake an Action into a normal model again. This paves the way for using Live Edits in place of the existing tools and commands. One place they are helpful is a simple object rotation - in particular adding a simple 15 degree rotation snap (which was almost impossible in the old system) is really handy for rotating objects cleanly.

The Angle snap was so useful that I've added it as standard to all object and curve rotations. You can choose whether it is on or off by default, and hold Shift to quickly swap snap on or off. I've probably spent hours in Curvy trying to line up my rotations neatly - now it is easy!

[Simon]

As mentioned before - a side effect of these Live Edits is that Proxies become simple again. And most usefully (for my sculpts) we regain the ability to make lightweight mirror copies of parts of the model (the green blob below). However unlike 2.0 these copies no longer have to mirror on the world axis, you can have mirrored copies anywhere in a scene with arbitrary rotations too (the blue object).



Proxies share the exact same mesh as the original, but you can give them different names, surface colours and materials if you like. They can also be scaled and rotated anywhere in the scene.

The connection between the original and the proxy is very small - if you wanted you could swap in a different object as the 'original' and all the proxy copies would immediately become clones of the replacement instead. Likewise if you delete the original, the proxies will just wait for a new object to be connected (rather than crashing!).

If you want to make a proxy properly unique for further modelling you can 'Bake' it into a real model.

One big advantage of Proxies comes when you mix in the idea of automatically generated models. Say you wanted to make a heap of rocks, or a forest of trees, or even links in a chain - Combining 'Live' generation of models in space or on a surface with very cheap proxies allows complex looking scenes with much smaller GPU burden and file sizes.

[Simon]

Using an Array of Proxies. This is a single lathe with a Array Action that makes copies with two offsets. So here I used one offset to rotate around the circle, and the other offset to shrink towards the centre and twist slightly.

Once you are happy with the Array, you can Bake this into separate Proxies for light-weight editing - or all the way into a unique mesh for sculpting.

I plan to add Array's along paths next, for everything from buttons to rollercoasters.

[franklejp]

It is really hard to tell with all of these new features
which one will be the biggest game changer. But I have
to admit these deformations are going to be hard to top.

I can't wait to get my hands on curvy3d v4!
Is it available to steam purchasers of v3?

[Simon]

Yes, as an upgrade for 3.0 users. And as a special offer: if you buy 3.0 now, it includes a pre-order of 4.0 at no further cost (including from Steam). viewtopic.php?f=38&t=3033