First off, just to temper expectations, this has a lot of development left and it's easy to crash. Don’t use this for production. However, before we get to far along, we'd welcome your input.
The goal of 2.0 is to introduce more polygon-style modeling commands inside of Rhino.
(We’re requiring registration so we can notify you of new builds, and the WIP won’t run on your computer unless you already have a T-Splines for Rhino license installed.)
2. Commands
The new polygon specific commands have a "tsm" prefix for tsMesh.
Here are the commands so far:
tsSmoothMode. Converts the polygon T-Spline to a smooth model.
tsPolyMode. Converts your smooth T-Spline model to a rough polygon.
tsPointsOn. Turns on Edge, Face, or Vertex grips.
tsExtrude. Using tsExtrude in mesh mode, you must first select the face(s) you would like to extrude, THEN enter the command. This is a
temporary restriction. The cool thing is that it is hooked up to the manipulator, so you specify the distance of the extrusion with the
manipulator. We anticipate having many of the commands in polymode hook up to the manipulator.
tsmWeld. Welds vertices. In this future it will also weld edges and faces. When you weld vertices you won't be able to go back to smooth
mode right now (the mesh will be invalid and we don't have repair tools written yet) ; of course that will be fixed in the future.
tsmDelete. Deletes faces in the mesh. This command will eventually delete any type of grip (faces, edges, or vertices). We figure that
just having a single command for them all would be the most useful (hopefully we'll hook into the delete key as well.) This command is
not incredible stable yet, and it breaks the mesh, so you won't be able to go back to smooth mode. Yes, that's quite a limitation; we will fix that soon.
And there are many commands yet to be written...
3. Known issues
Mesh objects must first be converted to a T-Spline before they can be switched to mesh mode or smooth mode.
There is currently no preview when dragging points in mesh mode.
Rhino mesh operations can be performed on the T-Spline mesh (such as delete faces) but the resultant mesh won't be a T-Mesh.
Currently, T-points are not represented visually when converted to a mesh. Faces with T-Points on them are triangulated. However, upon
converting back to T-Splines smooth mode, the T-Points are preserved.
Creases are preserved when converting from tsSmoothMode to tsMeshMode
By installing the WIP, you’ll also have access to the latest internal improvements for 1.x (in this release, there’s slightly improve UI for tsExtrude, for example).
All the best,
Matt
PS When responding during the WIP, we heartily encourage you to use the forum, so everyone can keep up on the conversation.
If you need to email us something privately, we encourage you to email bugsATtsplinesDOTcom. This will log the email directly in our new bugtracking software and help us track your comments and reports better. We are notified immediately when emails are sent there, so the response will be just as fast.
