Inner edges

Also the inlying edges of the spline patches that are connected by a multi patch can be edited now. You can bring out these inner edges by breaking the phong shading or by beveling.

Cut-outs

You can define cut-outs using a closed spline object. Several modeling functions, like extrusion or beveling are available to be applied to these cut-outs.

Solid extrusion

The solid extrusion is a new option for the outer edge profiles. With this a completely closed object will be generated, that can be assigned e.g. a transparent material.

Corner profiles

Up to now corner profiles were inserted automatically at the corners of the edge profiles, if the corner was also a polygon corner. Now you can control this behaviour by defining a threshold angle. Additionally, inner corners are included. Corner profiles serve as a controller for the roundings of HyperNURBS.

Horizontal and vertical offset

The former parameter "gap", that was used to define the distance of the outer edges of a multi patch to the lines of the spline, e.g. in order to realize the car-typical gaps between the components, was extended by a vertical dimension and is called now "offset". Both parameters accept also negative values.

Split patch

With this new function a spline patch can be devided into two patch objects along a line of the polygon mesh. The function creates a new spline object at the cutting edge and assigns an instance of it to each spline patch.

Further improvements and bugfixes

The stiching of the spline patches to a multi patch was more optimised, so that problems are eliminated, that might have occured at the crossing points of multiple spline patches.

Now, spline primitives can be used for the deforming. The bug, that deformed spline patches were rendered undeformed in the picture viewer is fixed.

Now, the subdivisions of the subordinated spline patches can be controlled relatively from the patches panel of the multi patch. Thus, you can test various polygonal resolutions using a percentual slider.

Tri-Patches

Now a spline patch can be created also from three splines. Tri-patches are build with triangles, in order to get a most consistent polygon spreading. Using quadrangles, the polygon mesh would converge to one corner, what may cause ugly creases.

Patch Creator

The so called comfort selection of version 1.1 was replaced by a new tool. With the Patch Creator you can create spline patches with just one mouse click. If you move the cursor into an area that is surrounded by three or four splines, a preview of the possible surface will be displayed. If you click, a Spline Patch object will be created using instances of the selected splines.

More control of the grid structure

Using graphes you can control the spreading of points on each edge of the spline patch. Thus, you are able to increase subdivisions for regions, that require a higher resolution without having to increase the number of subdivisions for the whole patch object.

Active spline ranges

Spline Patch 2.0 can now handle closed spline objects. When using closed splines, there are often several potentialities to build a surface. Spline ranges are used, to limit the valid range of a spline in order to get the desired surface patch. You may edit the ranges in the attribute manager or directly inside the editor view by dragging the handles on both sides of the ranges.

Edge profiles

Edge profiles cannot be edited for each single spline patch any more, but belong now to the parameters of the multi patch object. This way of proceeding has shown up more efficiency to the workflow and ensures that the edges of two neighbouring patches can be welded without any problems. The edge profiles are now added after stitching the single spline patches. This way, you'll get nice smooth surface elements. The edges of the multi patch will be automatically divided into numbered segments, for which you can switch on and off the selected edge profile.

In addition to the already known L and U profiles from version 1.1, you may now define custom profiles using spline objects.

Further improvements

The algorithm for calculating the surface works faster now and provides more consistent polygon meshes.

Selected spline patch objects are optionally displayed with additional informations. The corner points are labeled by the letters A, B, C and D to simplify the orientation when editing parameters that refer to specific edges or corner points. The orientation of the surface is displayed by a yellow line and the active spline ranges are drawn with the colour gradient that CINEMA 4D uses for splines in the point edit mode.

Indeed the orientation of a spline patch still bases on the order of it's assigned spline objects, but you don't need to care about that any more. If you call the plugin with three or four selected spline objects or if you create a spline patch using the Patch Creator, the splines (resp. their instances) will be ordered automatically in the right way. The orientation can be flipped by clicking on the "Reverse Orientation" button.

It's now possible to overwrite the settings for the number and the type of subdivisions of each spline patch lying in a multi patch by defining these parameters in the multi patch settings. All spline patches, that have the "Use Multi Patch Settings" option enabled, will take the parameters from the multi patch object. You can enable this option for all spline patches with just one mouse click.